On Thon; or, Thinking Gender in the Interstice

This essay takes “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” as an opening for thinking about the impact of Hortense Spillers's thought on Black feminist, queer, and transgender studies. In a reflection on the interstitial, the essay engages Spillers's approaches to the discursive, historiographic, and iconographic dimensions of racialized gender and sexuality in a reading of the failed philological proposal of thon and the life and public memory of the military figure Private William Cathay.