Keynote Speaker

“#GENDERFAILS: My Gender is Black, My Gender is Love

In this presentation I share new work from my podcast, #GENDERFAILS. #GENDERFAILS. In this podcast, I engage Black folk who represent a spectrum of identities and bring them into a conversation around gender, blackness, queerness, and love. This podcast/blog presents its listeners/readers with stories from a diverse group of Black people about their gendered experiences in the world. This podcast is an attempt to understand what many Black Queer/Trans scholars have argued in various places, that is,  Blackness is always already queer/trans. These ethnographic interviews act as a response to the various attempts to create “healthy” versus “toxic” masculinities in order to combat misogyny and patriarchal violence. I argue that the challenges that people experience because of their Black-gendered journeys are often intensified because of the ways organizers, artists, and scholars have attempted to create new masculinities, like “liberatory masculinity,” a synonym of health masculinity, as a way to repair the gendered and racialized violence of becoming that all Black people are forced to become under capitalism and colonialism. These attempts to rescue masculinity from toxicity are not enough because they continue to be tethered to the bind of the gender binary. In this presentation/workshop, I highlight various interviewees who when asked to identify their gender, respond by saying, “my gender is Black.” How does the reclamation of gender through the racialized category of Black shift the way we understand gender, such that we are able to behold the way Black genders always exceed the binary and provide us with a different way of knowing blackness that is gender-full.”