Abstract
Treva Ellison offers a framework for understanding the complexities of Black femme performance under racial capitalism in their essay, “The Labor of Werqing It: The Performance and Protest Strategies of Sir Lady Java,” first published in the 2017 anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. As an act of making power, werqing it has become attractive; it’s trending. Java’s struggle against the LAPD elucidates the labor of werqing it: both the labor politics of being a Black gender nonconforming woman and entertainment industry worker in postwar Los Angeles and the liminal labor of insisting on and inventing an undercommons for Black and queer social life through and under the oppressive forces of racial capitalism. Public interest in and discourse around gender and sexual nonconformity in Los Angeles have been iterative and related to dramatic, qualitative changes in the organization of economic, political, and social life.
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