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As Snorton, Gill-Peterson, and Detournay have previously established, black bodies and children are reduced to malleable flesh but society still pushes them to remake themselves within the binary system. Outside of the medical field, we have not quite explored how the gender binary is maintained. Through looking at Judith Butler, we can begin to get a deeper understanding. In Chapter 4: Gender is Burning of “Bodies That Matter”, Butler builds upon Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation to argue that gender is not a pre-existing identity but a performative embodiment of societal norms. Althusser discusses interpellation in a legal context writing “[it is] a unilateral act, as the power and force of the law to compel fear at the same time that it offers recognition at an expense” (82). When he writes that it’s a unilateral act, he emphasizes that interpellation is an action made by one party without the agreement of the other party which can create an inherent power dynamic. One can be hailed without any say or any voice about how they’re being represented. However, Butler argues that this concept can be applied in a larger context because gender policing is not exclusive to law officers. Surveillance is an issue many queer bodies face, especially queer bodies of color that are visibly deemed “gender deviants”. Butler argues that an interpellating call creates this dichotomy of how one is perceived and how one sees themselves; they demonstrate this through the use of “I” (representing the interpellated version of oneself). They write: “this kind of bracketing of the “I” may well be crucial to the thinking through of the constitutive ambivalence of being socially constituted, where “constitution” carries both the enabling and violating sense of ‘subjection’” (83). As I mentioned previously in relation to Detournay, being a racialized queer body can lead to either hypervisibility or invisibility. Butler is demonstrating something important and similar here when they write that this ‘constitution’ can both be enabling and violating. Recognition can be enabling because it allows us to use the language and frameworks to formulate our identities. However, it can also be violating because those same frameworks are built off of social norms, many of which are extremely limiting and restrict our freedom. Thus, depending on how one is interpellated, it can be empowering or restricting. However, more times than not it is restricting because interpellation relies on how others see you within our social construction of what certain gender identities are supposed to look like. This is the relevance of the bracketed “I”; the I within the quotes is still me however the quotes emphasize that another person is creating me as a subject in their own world. I use this all to say that interpellation can occur on many different scales and it often falls on the subject to be able to differentiate the interpellation from how they view themselves. It is their responsibility to find agency in being subjected, not the other way around. This tension between how others perceive us and how we see ourselves is complicated – but as Butler suggests, there is room for resistance in interpellation. Although interpellation imposes certain roles, individuals can push back by performing their gender in ways that reject those expectations.

While Butler emphasizes the potential for resistance through gender performativity, I’ve found that resistance is not always empowering. I resonate with the sentiment of Butler’s argument but I also want to expand upon it to showcase my own experience. In my life, I have felt empowered and confident going against gender norms in a mission to find my true self, the true outward expression that represents me the most. However, it can be exhausting to have to negotiate with society about what identities should be seen as valid. In a white supremacist society, I don’t see much of myself in the outside world or in the media. In addition to being a racialized body, I am also a non binary body who doesn’t quite conform to standard ideas of “transness” or “non-binaryness”. I’m constantly bombarded by societal expectations and media narratives about what is desirable. Even within queer spaces, non-binary bodies that are highlighted are often white, privileged, or conform to white-centric ideals about desirability. It is for this reason that I struggle a lot with feelings of inadequacy and seeing myself as valid, beautiful, or desirable. That is the feeling I wanted to showcase in my photo. As a university student, I am surrounded by not just constant images of whiteness but also forms of (white) elitism and nationalism. It is rare that I see myself in visual aspects of my school community or environment. When I do, it’s typically a reminder that historically black people have been used and seen as non-humans. As one goes through life, we internalize the messages that are put in front of us. Additionally, I internalize how others interpellate me. In a community where black bodies were reduced to flesh and very often weren’t granted the status of a gender, I struggle with how others may perceive me. In turn, I not only worry about whether I will be seen as a valid body deserving of a gender identity, but also a valid non binary body that is generally desirable. 

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In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, Hortense Spillers explores the American symbolic system, specifically using the 1965 Moynihan Report, to highlight the historical mistreatment of Black families. Spillers articulates how this treatment stemmed from slavery, emphasizing how blackness complicated society’s understanding of gender. If black people weren’t seen as human, the idea of black bodies having genders was nonsensical. In distinguishing the body from flesh, Spillers writes: “Before the ‘body’ there is the ’flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, of the reflexes of iconography” (67). Here, Spillers emphasizes that black bodies could not reach the status of “body” because they were reduced to just “flesh” under the system of slavery. Moreover, when expanding on the treatment of black female bodies, she says: “This materialized scene of unprotected female flesh– of female flesh “ungendered”-- offers a praxis and a theory, a text for living and dying” (68). Thus, we are now introduced to the concept of ungendered flesh which shows how black bodies were stripped of their humanity. By being reduced to flesh, they were stripped of any identity and official place in society. Furthermore, under slavery, Spillers argues that there was no female body – every body was seen as equally non-human and thus incapable of having a gender. Additionally, because she writes this as a theory that can be applied to both living and dead bodies, we can continue to use her framework to analyze black bodies. C. Riley Snorton does exactly this in “Anatomically Speaking: Ungendered Flesh and the Science of Sex”, where he uses Spillers framework to explore how slavery created gender as a racialized product. In his piece, Snorton discusses the infamous “father” of gynecology, J. Marion Sims, to showcase how many violent practices have produced racialized gender. More than that, he emphasizes that flesh is a malleable material that can be remade as a function of human categorization: “[we] trace collateral genealogies of blackness and transness in which captive and divided flesh functions as malleable matter for mediating and remaking sex and gender” (20). The use of Sims as a case study for Snorton’s argument is especially relevant because his experiments on unanesthetized enslaved black women produced the medical myth that black people have “thicker skin” and “lower pain tolerances”. Consequently, this is one of many reasons why any medical room is a site of extreme anxiety for me. Being perceived as a black woman leaves me much to worry about; whether I will be understood, validated, and supported. To convey this fear, I used the drawn sketches from the 1912 Medical Gynecology in Snorton’s piece as inspiration for my photo. The sketches reimagined the way that Sims performed these dehumanizing and objectifying vaginal exams. With these images, I wanted to exemplify how in medical rooms, I feel like I am one of my ancestors: in a submissive position, completely covered to hide my personhood, and overall ignored by medical practitioners. Further than this, I worry about whether or not my pain will be taken seriously; if my symptoms will be validated. Will my body be seen as flesh ungendered or will I be seen as a complex human being capable of thoughts and emotions?

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Together, Hortense Spillers and C. Riley Snorton have created this compelling concept of (ungendered) malleable flesh. I find that this notion relates to Jules Gill-Peterson’s theory of plasticity. In “Histories of the Transgender Child”, she argues that transgender children have long existed before the term came into being. This is relevant because she is writing in response to the narrative that “trans children, these various gatekeepers say in unison, have no history at all” (2). This is another example of historical erasure, which we’ve seen regarding enslaved black bodies that created the foundation of gynecology. Similarly, her deep analysis of trans children of color showcases how another subset of racialized bodies contributed to the medical production of (racialized) sex and gender. According to Gill-Peterson, in the early 20th century, the racialization of sex/gender was intrinsically tied to eugenic rationales which is evident based on the treatment of racialized bodies as merely flesh. Moreover, she primarily argues that medical treatment for trans children was made available through this concept of racialized plasticity. She promptly describes plasticity as “an abstract form of whiteness, the capacity to take on new form and be transformed by medical scientific intervention” (4). Now, it becomes evident how eugenics became a part of the conversation. Despite the fact that children were seen as malleable flesh that could be remade into any form, the medical system still chose to recreate not only the gender binary but also racial eugenics. If a trans child were to receive care, they were expected to take on the stereotypical characteristics and traits of the gender they felt most aligned with. Additionally, this notion of plasticity allowed doctors to reject trans children of color because they weren’t “plastic enough”. In other words, they were not malleable enough to conform to whiteness, continuing the exclusion of black bodies. This all contributes to the historical disparities between queer bodies of color and white queer bodies as there is a hierarchy of systemic privileges within marginalized communities. Although Gill-Peterson’s theory focuses on trans children, I feel her framework can be applied to gender-non conforming bodies in general. For trans bodies, plasticity became a measure of their value; in essence, they were not seen as “real” trans bodies if they weren’t plastic enough. Thus, one can imagine how this affected gender-non conforming bodies (i.e intersex, nonbinary) because there was no mode for them to be considered “real bodies” unless they constrict their non-binary identity to somehow fit inside the binary once again. In “The Racial Life of ‘Cisgender’”, Diane Detournay expands on this idea: “Race-as-flesh operates as an undifferentiated field of difference against and through which the sex/gender distinction emerges. In that sense, race does not qualify cis/trans, but is the condition of possibility for sexed embodiment” (62). This short but powerful quote emphasizes how concepts like cisgender and transgender aren’t developed in isolation to each other, they are purposefully constructed by racialized ideas of normativity. Consequently, I think that black nonbinary bodies face both the issue of hypervisibility and invisibility. On one hand, they may experience hypervisibility as negative backlash because their racialized bodies are not conforming to both gender roles and racialized ideas of what normal black bodies look like. On the other hand, they may also face invisibility because they don’t conform to white queer narratives about what nonbinary bodies “should” look like. All of these complex ideas are narratives that I internalize as a nonbinary black body trying to navigate the world. White supremacy infiltrates every social identity and impacts the way that racialized bodies see themselves. Cultural ideals like “a pretty vagina is a pink one” promote white-centric ideals about normativity, once again impacting those that don’t fit the norm. All of this is quite overwhelming and that’s the emotion I wanted to evoke with my photo. Sometimes, I feel like a glitch in the system – an error that shouldn’t exist. A system runs smoothly when everything fits its expected patterns, but I exist outside those norms. My identity as a nonbinary black person often feels like an anomaly in a world that refuses to make space for me. This feeling of being “wrong” – as if my body is somehow a mistake – is something I’ve internalized through social myths about AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth) bodies, about blackness, and about gender itself. That is why in my image, I am visually surrounded by myths about the vagina and about black women (i.e. how we’re “supposed” to look and smell). It is incredibly damaging to grow up with these kinds of widespread misconceptions and myths and in my experience, it led to a lifelong struggle with my self-perception and body image.

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As Butler demonstrates in “Bodies That Matter”, our society has created limited understandings of gender as a method of control. Spanish writer and philosopher, Paul Preciado, was greatly inspired by Judith Butler as a trans man navigating academia. His speech-turned-book, “Can the Monster Speak?”, showcases this very struggle. He is speaking at an academic conference calling out the very systems that he, as an intellectual, is a part of. His main viewpoint argues for a complete retransformation of both psychological and psychoanalytic discourses that have continually embraced patriarchal and colonial violence. As mentioned previously, these violent practices maintain the gender binary as an institution. I use violence here as an expansive term to describe “the practices of observation, objectification, punishment, exclusion and death put in place by psychoanalysis and psychiatry when dealing with dissidents to the regimes of sexual difference and colonial heteropatriarchy” (74). These disciplines encourage fear as a continued method of control for those that are gender outlaws. Furthermore, even within trans spaces, the gender binary still lingers like a post-colonial effect. Sandy Stone’s “Posttranssexual Manifesto” speaks to this exact issue regarding trans care: “They go from being unambiguous men, albeit unhappy men, to unambiguous women. There is no territory between” (225). Stone emphasizes that one cannot transition into a non-binary identity, they must traverse towards the “opposite” gender in order to receive the care they need. Although Stone was speaking to trans care in the 1950s, it is all an effect of colonialism which we have not yet deconstructed and thus still remains. Today, trans care is still restrictive and limited to only those who meet the “qualifications” of a real trans body. The latter is the primary focus of Judith Butler’s “Undiagnosing Gender” in which they break down the issues with the medicalization and pathologization of transness. The qualifications for receiving trans care include a diagnosis of gender dysphoria/gender identity disorder. Butler adds, “a diagnosis of gender disorder has to conform to the sway of the DSM-IV’s definition of gender dysphoria” (78). This contributes to the collapse of gender dysphoria as trans* identity; to be trans or non-binary is to experience intense discomfort to the point of medical diagnosis. It creates this inseparable connection between gender nonconforming identities and long term mental instability. The medical system does not allow transness to be synonymous with joy or freedom, which sets a large scale precedent on what transness is supposed to look like, feel like, and be. The institutional lack of trans autonomy frames gender as something trans people will always be caged by. This understanding of gender as a cage is the foundation for Paul Preciado’s speech. He starts by referencing a 1917 text written by Franz Kafka. The story follows an ape (Red Peter) who learns to mimic human behavior as a survival method. It is through this analogy that Preciado establishes gender as a cage, drawing a parallel between Red Peter’s story and the experience of marginalized peoples. Speaking about his own trans identity, Preciado writes, “I was assigned female at birth and like the mutant ape, I extricate myself from that confined “cage,” in order to enter another cage, granted, but at least this time through my own initiative” (21). Because we live in a world built on social categorizations, we are still in a gendered society. This is what Preciado means when he goes from one cage to the other. Despite the fact that he lives freely as a transgender man, living in a gendered system means you are still subjected to that kind of gendering. Until we extricate gender from our cultural understanding of bodies, we will still be caged by the concept of even having a gender. That is why Preciado writes in the way that he does; it is freeing to live authentically but it does not grant us freedom. You may still be interpellated as an identity you don’t align with, you may still be misgendered, you still may be ostracized within your own community. There are so many layers to the cage as emphasized by Stone, Butler, and Preciado. In a society where transness is defined with very rigid borders, it replicates the limitedness of the gender binary. The replication in tandem with media representations pushed to the forefront creates a hierarchy of “valid” gender presentations. This is exacerbated for me as a black body because black women are both hyper feminized/hypersexualized and hypermasculinized. There are very few examples of black nonbinary bodies in the media, let alone diverse examples. I, myself, don’t conform to the gender binary and I also don’t conform to rigid understandings of nonbinary presentation. While as Preciado says, it is freeing to live as my authentic body, I still feel caged. As a person assigned female at birth (AFAB), when I decide to dress femininely, I fear that I’m not nonbinary enough. I can still be interpellated as a woman and that messes with my head. In the medical sense, I’m not traversing towards the “opposite” gender as a trans* body and I fear that it negates my status as a nonbinary person. These are the consequences of gender as a binary institution that is heavily policed. Even bodies that identify outside of the binary are still continually impacted by that very same binary. In my photo, I wanted you to feel the same worry I grapple with as I navigate a world that continues to uphold a problematic system of categorization.

* trans* = inclusive term to say “trans and non-binary”

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As I’ve highlighted through the words of Paul Preciado, freedom is not something that is easily granted to queer bodies, let alone queer bodies of color. Since the abolishment of slavery in the U.S., oppression towards black bodies has continued to shapeshift overtime into various forms of marginalization: systemic racism, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, mass incarceration– the list goes on. The way I see it, freedom is not going to be granted to me in my lifetime. Thus, as Preciado writes, it is “not a case of choosing freedom but of creating it” (33). This is exactly how I see my life, especially regarding my education. My parents emigrated to the U.S. from Haiti in 1993 to give my brothers and I better opportunities and I do not take that lightly. They began paving my future pathway when they emigrated and I will continue the work they started by climbing the ladder of higher education. Thomas Jefferson founded UVA specifically for his elite, white Southern sons. The only way that black people were included in the university culture was as enslaved laborers – reduced to what Hortense Spillers described as ungendered flesh. Just as Spillers highlights how enslaved black bodies were denied social personhood, UVA’s historical exclusion of black students reflects the same violent logic – one that positioned blackness as incompatible with intellectual and academic spaces. Even now, I feel the lingering effects of that legacy as I navigate a predominantly white institution that often reminds me it was never built for me. But here I am, a proud queer first-generation Haitian-American, subverting the expectations of the same founders that created the prestigious institution that I now attend. On one hand, it is powerful to embark on journeys that my ancestors were forcefully excluded from. On the other hand, as Preciado demonstrates, it can still feel like a cage. Jeffersonian legacies still remain here as his ideologies and thoughts are still prevalent and important to those who lead UVA’s community. I wanted to emphasize this element in my image by using the UVA colors (orange & blue) to showcase how much of his legacy still impacts the physical and cultural aspects of the university. UVA has not completely severed ties with its racist founder and in that way, I am living in a Jefferson-branded cage as a UVA student. However, now I have learned the language of my elitist colonizers, I have conquered the space that once deliberately excluded me. It is within these spaces that I was able to learn the true histories of my predecessors; the strong black women, the queer bodies, the trans children of color– they all existed and were just as much a part of American history.  Furthermore, I have learned what I was sheltered away from: theories of gender, histories of sexuality, and social constructions of womanhood. Through this education, I have begun to understand myself better. I no longer have to create my own words to describe my own experience. I wanted my photo to feel that same sense of self-empowerment. I am stepping on Thomas Jefferson’s toes, figuratively and literally, and saying as Preciado writes “I am the monster who speaks to you… a sophisticated monster capable of expressing myself in the language of the norm” (19, 47). My body is a part of the color filter that represents Jefferson’s legacy and being stuck in this timeline/his version of history, but my head is not. My head (and brain) are free from the filter, completely in my own color scheme, showcasing that I am creating my own freedom– my own pathway to being a part of academia. Neither my race, nor my sexuality, nor my gender identity, will prevent me from reclaiming my place in society. My existence — as a black, nonbinary, queer person — defies the exclusionary systems that tried to erase people like me. I carry the strength of my ancestors, who were denied the education and recognition they deserved. By existing unapologetically, I am creating the kind of freedom Preciado envisions — one that isn’t given, but made.

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In a world full of exclusionary systems of power, what does it look like for me --a racialized and gendered body-- to live in this world?