We are in a time labeled the “transgender tipping point,” a period characterized by the scaling up of legal protections, visibility, rights, and politics centered on transgender people. The contemporary visual landscape is populated with the bodies of Black women. How does the language and discourse of the tipping point elide the presence of a saturation of Black bodies? In academia this elision has taken the shape of the expansion and institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline. We are interested in what happens to the category of transgender as it becomes routed through the logics and power lines of institutionality and the metrics of administration. This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is the product and process of our attempt to think through how the institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline functions as a scene of subjection for blackness—for Black people and places.
We have engaged multiple...
