If you picked up Black Trans Feminism thinking that it would offer an epistemological and/or ontological theorization of what it means to be a Black trans feminist, you will undoubtedly be surprised by what you read. Marquis Bey, the text's author, spends the introduction delineating what the text aims to accomplish—namely, to provide an abolitionist analysis of blackness, transness, and feminism such that Black trans feminism emerges as a methodological, agential, and performative approach to inhabiting the world and beyond. Black Trans Feminism makes two primary arguments: (1) matter and materiality cannot be understood as synonymous with “being,” and (2) the categories of race and gender are distinct from Black trans feminism because the latter cannot be located on or in, and in fact exceeds, the body. Bey's abolitionist framework holds that readers must disavow their attachments to hegemonic categories, such as racial and gender identification, because said dimensions of...
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