Can I Get a Witness? Black Feminism, Trans Embodiment, and Thriving Past the Fault Lines of Care

Can I Get a Witness?Black Feminism, Trans Embodiment, and Thriving Past the Fault Lines of Care SA Smythe (bio) How do we organize around our differences, neither denying them nor blowing them up out of proportion? The first step is an effort of will on your part. Try to remember, to keep certain facts in mind. —Audre Lorde, "I Am Your Sister" What follows is a composite reflection of encounters and experiences that I have had in the academy over the past decade—not to keep score of a generalized list of grievances, but to convey that these are the kinds of experiences that I routinely must prepare myself to negotiate. Regardless of whether they ultimately transpire, the fact of having to brace myself against the fault lines of care and the potential for antagonism or harm is a taxing labor that takes its toll. It is the sort of distraction that is a feature rather than a flaw (which is to say, a fault) of the academic industrial complex that must be altered. Thus, this reflection includes concrete strategies borne from those experiences that might be useful to figure out how to mitigate future and ongoing harm, so that we can all take up the work of meaningful solidarity in the academy, and of collective liberation despite and beyond it. As a conversation intended for and between Black feminists, those of us who are trans, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary (perhaps as well as queer, [End Page 85] asexual, or other marginalized sexual orientations and gender identities) have needed to consider and develop strategies to communicate between cis or non-trans and heterosexual Black feminists for our collective survival. To that end, there are some things that those Black feminists in the academy might want to know and do, on an embodied and material level when engaging with us in intellectual, political, and social community. This kind of necessary self-care work holds that making room for living into our principles rather than merely stating them in the abstract requires introspection and a reckoning with the oppressive tendencies that we all differentially share. This care-full work might occasion cis or non-trans Black women feminist academics to sit with their own trouble and assess the fault lines of care for themselves as it pertains to their relationships to trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming (TNBGNC) people in Black feminist academic spaces and in their communities writ large. That way, it's not just TNBGNC people coercively serving as the proverbial canary in the coal mine of Black feminist thought wherever contradictory entrenchments into the gender binary are concerned. When beginning to write this piece about the practice and politics of care, critique, and clarity for Black feminists across the gender spectrum, I found myself feeling insecure and deeply afraid. What if I am misread? What if people perceive my thinking to be indicative of internalized oppression? What if people who share similar embodiment or identities think that I am selling them out? What if the people who I am addressing feel I am antagonizing them? And so on, and so forth, until all I was confronted with was the blithe indifference of the blinking cursor in an MS Word document for weeks on end. The imaginary critics with their scathing and hyper-discerning assessments of the person espousing them—casting doubt and calling into question my very embodiment—led to a kind of inertia, through which nothing could even be written at all. There is a deep and familiar irony in attempting to write about the politics of care and caring so much about responses to the as-yet-unwritten work that it manifested a blockage in my ability to complete it. That excessive iteration of care—caring too much—led to self-protective inaction, sidestepping the vulnerable process of sorting things out that can only be achieved through active and messy communication, written or otherwise. My imagination foreclosed any ability to hail a generative or compassionate set of readers and thus a care-full environment of people who would see my humanity first—which is to say, a generous audience of people who also don't have...