Cripping the Welfare Queen

Drawing together feminist- and queer-of-color critique with disability theory, this essay offers a literary-cultural reframing of the welfare queen in light of critical discourses of disability. It does so by taking up the discourse of dependency that casts racialized, low-income, and disabled populations as drains on the state, reframing this discourse as a potential site of coalition among antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist disability politics. Whereas antiwelfare policy cast independence as a national ideal, this analysis of the welfare mother elaborates a version of disability and women-of-color feminism that not only takes dependency as a given but also mines the figure of the welfare mother for its transformative potential. To imagine the welfare mother as a site for reenvisioning dependency, this essay draws on the “ruptural possibilities” of minority literary texts, to use Roderick A. Ferguson’s coinage, and places Sapphire's 1996 novel Push in conversation with Jesmyn Ward's 2011 novel Salvage the Bones. Both novels depict young Black mothers grappling with the disabling context of public infrastructural abandonment, in which the basic support systems for maintaining life—schools, hospitals, social services—have become increasingly compromised. As such, these novels enable an elaboration of a critical disability politic centered on welfare queen mythology and its attendant structures of state neglect, one that overwrites the punitive logics of public resource distribution. This disability politic, which the author terms crip-of-color critique, foregrounds the utility of disability studies for feminist-of-color theories of gendered and sexual state regulation and ushers racialized reproduction and state violence to the forefront of disability analysis.

Race and the Integrity of the Line

It is rare to find visual representations of female sexual pleasure in sexological treatises. Robert Latou Dickinson's Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy (1932) uses illustrations of sexual response to avoid making his text sensuous or pornographic. Like the charts in William Masters and Virginia Johnson's Human Sexual Response (1966), these drawings are carefully nestled between statistics and physiological summaries to embed them within the realm of the scientific and pedagogical. However, both are presumed to be racially unmarked. This article shows how blackness disrupts visual representations of pleasure and femininity while theorizing how the line functions as a way to maintain a norm. Against this, the potential of brown jouissance emerges via the zigzag style of contemporary Filipino artist Jevijoe Vitug. In his portrait, a glimpse of racialized, sensual excess emerges.

After Sexology

Is sexology over? What does one do with its history, at once a seemingly remote relic and a persistent logic of biopolitics today? “Sexology and Its Afterlives” begins from the premise that the history of sexology lives in the infrastructures of the present. Locating the afterlives of sexology in material and aesthetic form, this introduction to the special issue engages the largely unmarked detritus of a disaggregated sexological project, whose components have found renewed life in the biopolitical apparatus. The contributors to this issue identify not only familiar sites of sexological persistence (the sex-segregated public toilet) but also less immediately obvious ones (the Moynihan report, redlining, the army base) as executing the unfinished business of the sexological project. This breadth of sexological diffusion makes its analysis a necessarily interdisciplinary prospect, and the contributors call on disability studies, trans studies, Black studies, women-of-color feminism, visual culture, and the history of sexuality, generating emergent concepts, including crip-of-color critique (Kim), binary-abolitionist praxis (Stryker), a “trans-mad” aesthetic (Crawford), and a shift toward expressivity as a framework (Musser). Across the issue, newly imagined sites of collective politics come into view as a payoff for working through the stalled-out imaginaries of sexological binarisms.

On Stalling and Turning

This series of elliptically interrelated autotheoretical vignettes offers a “wayward genealogy” of how the author came to be involved in the Stalled! public toilet redesign project and what that project entails. The article revolves around observations of the actions of stalling and turning and of the spatial imaginaries that make these actions both necessary and legible in a variety of contexts—of watching pelicans dive into the Pacific Ocean, living on the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp, encountering transphobic feminism, researching San Francisco's urban history, and reading psychoanalytic theory, among others. After describing the origins of the Stalled! project in recent public discourse on “transgender toilets,” and its practical designs for abolishing the gender binary in space, the article suggests that concepts of transness make sense only in relation to a spatial configuration on which the logic of the term depends: it requires difference and separation as a precondition of its transversal operations, even as it demonstrates how other arrangements—other floor plans, not just of sex and gender but of space and time and sociality—are possible.

Four Gestures toward a Trans-Mad Aesthetic of Space

This article argues for what the author calls a trans-mad aesthetic of space, defined as designs or artworks that embark, sense, emote, and collect, in ways that queerly disrupt the norms of the public sphere. These four aesthetic operations resist, in turn, four current affective/spatial norms of mental health treatment: confinement, rationality, repression, and an individualizing model of madness. As part of unfolding this model for a trans-mad aesthetic, the article asserts that the link between transgender and madness (as categories) is not merely one of addition—say, people who are both transgender and mad—but, rather, one of mutual constitution. To make these suggestions, the article engages an eccentric archive that includes posters that advocate transgender depathologization, Greek mythologies of gendered madness, government legislation about sexual sterilization, and psych ward design protocols. Its two key case studies, however, are artistic: Hannah Hull and James Leadbitter's “Madlove: A Designer Asylum” and the oeuvre of Montreal performance artist Coral Short.

In the Wake of Visual Failure

This article examines the role of the visual in instances of recorded anti-Black racial violence and pushes against dominant discourses of the technological rescue narrative—that technology and more visibility will lead to different outcomes of accountability, protection, and safety. Instead, this article argues that the tightly bound association of anti-Black racial violence's recognizability to the visual has created a dynamic that simultaneously moves us closer to and further away from its ontological truths. Examining Twitter as a multisensorial platform and its users’ imaginative engagements with the #IfIDieInPoliceCustody hashtag memorializing Sandra Bland's death, the author identifies that users craft an anticipatory nonspectatorship, a mode of imaginative witnessing arising from the contexts of technological and visual failure and the situated imaginations of Black epistemologies. These users register a deep suspicion of the evidentiary and refuse the spectacular of racial violence's visual form, instead highlighting its ubiquitous and quotidian nature by asserting themselves into their own scenes of visual failure and becoming witnesses to their own imagined deaths. Finally, in identifying the visual failures surrounding Sandra Bland's jail cell, the author illuminates how the ontology of the glitch can demonstrate the mechanics of white supremacy's operations.

Counting Frequency

Examining Black women's experiences with policing, this article argues that police terror is not predicated upon gender; rather, it enacts gender by undoing gender. Thus, it requires a new arithmetic of time and space in order to read beyond normative, hypermasculine narratives of police violence. While the dominant discourse of race and policing asserts that police terror disproportionately affects Black men, the frequency of Black women's experiences with police terror attunes to a lingering yet deadly impact beyond the linear, Cartesian dimensions of body counting, a frequency the article terms sequelae. Policing stretches and bends time and space as part of its (un)gendering practice. Through a brief survey of cases in Brazil and the United States, this article considers sequelae as a new arithmetic for calculating the multiple frequencies of police terror against Black women. Specifically, the article examines the case of Luana Barbosa dos Reis, a Black lesbian mother who was beaten to death by police officers in São Paulo in 2016. The article argues that her beating was an act of (un)gendering—a desire to both discipline her as a Black female/mother and erase her potential humanity by denying her desired gender identification (female). In this sense, her death was an act of anti-Black terror “in the wake.” Through a close reading of the police ledger, the police report, and the physical violence she endured, the article argues that her story teaches us the need for a new way of counting the frequency of police terror in relationship to time, space, and the Black female/mother body.

Broken Automatons and Barbed Ecologies in Ligia Lewis's Choreographic Imaginary

This article considers choreographer Ligia Lewis's hour-long ensemble performance Water Will (in Melody) to theorize on the relationship between ecological fugitivity and black fugitive movement. It explores how Lewis's choreography disrupts the colonial space-times of colonialism and slavery by offering portals into other space-times. In Water Will (in Melody), racialized assemblages break down from overuse and from glaring surveillance in the form of illumination. The last few minutes of the piece evoke an ambivalent postapocalyptic space-time where darkness becomes textured with what seems to be moonlight peeking into a wet cave. This ending evokes the ecological of histories of fugitivity and the earthiness of Édouard Glissant's concept of opacity, both frequently overlooked in discussions of black fugitivity. The final section traces Lewis's fugitive choreography into what the article calls the barbed ecologies of the hills of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, sites of black and indigenous marronage and symbiosis.

Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value

This article takes the presentation of mechanical and informatic models in Samuel Delany's Neveryóna as an occasion to examine the relations of force, abstraction, information, and differential valuation that constitute racial capitalism. In order to do this, the article considers the continuities and divergences between the principles those models demonstrate, the lessons on value and economic determination that precede them, and Delany's subsequent presentation of surplus populations, intricated “free” and slave labor, and the modes of racialized differentiation that shape and are shaped in the interstices of those social formations. In Delany's sword-and-sorcery bildungsroman, the models illustrate the abstract logic of value, show that logic to be informatic in character, and point toward a dialectical relationship between this informatic logic and the concrete practices of dispossession that produce and operate through ascriptive race and gender regimes. Value's abstract operations are too often understood to be incommensurable with such regimes, yet Delany's presentation deploys the language and processes associated with informatics to reveal an essential relationship between the abstract network that results from value's mediating function and the modes of ascription and concrete violence that, as a result of such mediation, tend to be associated with precapitalist or noncapitalist social formations.

Introduction

This introduction to the special issue “Educational Undergrowth” proposes an ecological view of educational institutions and practices, one that foregrounds the porosity of borders so that entities and institutions that can sometimes seem distinct are thought of as always entangled. The editors elaborate this ecological view by drawing on theories of coloniality, especially the work of Sylvia Wynter (and her human/Man distinction) and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (in The Undercommons). In this framing, the university appears as a specific, but not isolated, part of a colonial ecology structured around producing Man. This allows both for critical accounts of how coloniality shapes institutions such as schools and universities, always in relation to many other institutions and sites, and for speculative experiments in queer, decolonial, abolitionist education. The introduction intervenes in contemporary leftist debates about the university in particular and education more generally by offering a way of attuning to critical, abolitionist, and decolonial projects as specific but intraactive outgrowths of the colonial ecology and myriad disruptive projects (happening both in and outside of institutionalized schools). On the one hand, educational undergrowth accounts for how resources circulate unevenly in the colonial ecology so that the “growth” of some people, institutions, and projects is possible only because others are deprived, defunded, and disinvited. On the other hand, it draws on affect theory, new materialisms, and work in decolonial and critical ethnic studies to valorize otherwise marginal, bewildering, errant educational encounters that are always taking place in the undergrowth of the university.