Preface

at a time when we see in the United States and elsewhere the rise of a virulent right wing, with its outspoken defense of white supremacy and explicit criminalization of transgender and gay people along with the criminalization of abortion, this Feminist Studies issue focuses on histories of US racial formations, gender/sexual embodiment, transgender and cripqueer activism, and exile. The review essay by Candice Lyons describes new approaches to the history of nineteenth-century racial formations. Joy Ellison, Jess Waggoner, Jessica Lee Mathiason, Adam Ostolski, and Sonja Mackenzie center gender/sexual embodiment and nonnormative people’s experience by exploring, respectively, transgender radical activism in the face of police violence targeting mainly Black transgender individuals in the Midwest, the cripqueer challenges to the exclusions of disabled people from the lesbian community, the corporate construction of reproductive risk, the right-wing invocation in Poland of resonant anti-Semitic tropes to demonize gay people, and a creative autoethnography about the challenges faced by queer parents raising children in homophobic societies. The art essay by Eva HD elicits another notion of “trans” in examining Iranian photographer Gohar Dashti’s images evoking migration, exile, and the transhuman life of plants.

Candice Lyons’s review essay introduces three recent Black feminist books that focus on the gendered dimensions of slavery, not simply as patriarchal violence, as is often presumed, but as an institution that white women actively participated in, benefited from, and used to negotiate their own “social and financial freedom.” In this way, Lyons shows how white women’s freedoms were fundamentally built on Black women’s unfreedoms across the diaspora. Building on the earlier work of Thavolia Glymph, who challenged narratives of white women’s innocence and reluctant participation in US plantation slavery, the essay highlights the importance of these scholarly interventions for understanding white women’s participation in the racialized gender power relations of societies built on enslavement. The first featured book, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, uses white women’s consistent presence in the archive to show how they participated in the construction of the institution by managing plantations, engaging in physical and emotional violence, callously selling the children of enslaved women who were their property, and circumventing patriarchal inheritance laws to secure their material wealth from enslavement. The second reviewed book, Marisa J. Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, moves to the Caribbean to show how white women in Barbados navigated their own economic and legal vulnerabilities by securing their fortunes and those of women in their families through the ownership of enslaved people. The final book reviewed, Hershini Bhana Young’s Illegible Will: Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora, focuses on the limits of white women’s solidarity with Black women in the context of white men’s sexual violence against Black women. Together, the books reviewed demonstrate the racialized gender foundations of slavery, urging us to therefore consider how these lay the grounds for the gendered afterlives of slavery, to use the language of Saidiya Hartman, in geographies across the diaspora.

As certain states have begun once again to criminalize transgender people as well as lesbians and gay men, Joy Ellison’s “‘Wear Your Most Daring Clothes, Honey’: The Transvestite/Transsexual Legal Committee and the Emergence of Trans-feminine Feminist Movements in the Midwest” could not be more timely. Ellison elucidates the Transvestite/Transsexual Legal Committee (tlc), formed in Chicago in 1971 and expanded throughout smaller cities in the Midwest, as a multiracial, multigender coalition calling for the liberation of feminine trans people of color. tlc emphasized the needs of trans-feminine street queens, which were distinct from those of gay men. With strategies that included short-term harm reduction with long-term revolutionary vision, tlc organized against an interlocking system of state, cultural, and interpersonal violence that targeted trans people of color, including a Chicago ordinance that outlawed people who appeared in public dressed in a manner “not belonging to his or her sex.” They organized to challenge anti-trans dress restrictions, police violence...