This essay returns to Evelynn Hammonds’s field-changing essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” with a focus on the labor of knowledge production under fraught institutional conditions, characterized in this essay as languaging. The simultaneous desire for and impossibility of accurate language to describe racialized, gendered, and sexual subjectivity drive Hammonds’s essay as well as a number of other key texts in Black feminist sexuality studies. This essay (re)introduces the diagnostic category of dysphoria to speak to this paradox: here, dysphoria describes the affective and psychic condition of institutional illegibility and fungibility for racialized and gendered people. Using the analytic of dysphoria to characterize and connect the political economy of Black feminist knowledge production and the life narrative of A. Dionne Stallworth, a Black trans woman activist, this essay directs urgent attention to the simultaneously material, spiritual, psychic, and affective dimensions of self-, knowledge-, and world-making.
The Black (W)hole of Dysphoria
v varun chaudhry is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, where his research and teaching focus on trans-gender studies, black feminist research praxis, and queer of color critique. V’s writing spans academic scholarship, resource guides, and public scholarship: most recently, V wrote the text for a ten-year retrospective of the Trans Justice Funding Project. V’s academic writing can be found in such journals as glq; tsq; Signs; Feminist Anthropology; and Feminist Theory. V is currently at work on his book manuscript, “Transcraft: Pedagogies of World-Building,” which ethnographically traces how institutions confine and regulate trans and allied people of color, as well as the ways these communities persistently insist on world-building in the face of these realities.
V Varun Chaudhry; The Black (W)hole of Dysphoria. differences 1 September 2024; 35 (2): 55–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-11259696
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