She/They: On the Tensions of a Black Non-Binary Femme-hood
Part of being lonely is being an outlier. Loneliness can be a fuel, a mirror; a powerful place for development and self-understanding. It can also be isolating, having no one else to talk to and affirm who you are and what you believe.
Beginnings
As a young child, I accepted my outsider status: sometimes seen as introverted, quirky, or bohemian in nature. My family indulged and nurtured my eccentricities, giving me the permission I need to buck all the normal conventions of a little Southern Black girl. I’d had a trail blazed by many who came before me to affirm that my deviance was to be celebrated and developed rather than silenced and censured. I became incredibly comfortable with releasing my ideas and curiosities and proclamations into the world and accepting whatever judgment or shock that would come. Thankfully, I had more than my family to encourage my difference. I had so many teachers and guides over the course of my childhood that chose to acknowledge my difference as brilliance and creativity.
“Smile Baby Girl”
As I grew, I learned more about the pressures of a society that sees your labels as more important than your truths. I’d carried my communities’ ambition for the next generation to reach further than the last. I’d hoped that ambition would be big enough to carry me and my dreams in the dangerous new world I was entering taking me further away from my beginnings. Away from the safety of home, I discovered fear in the ways that I stuck out beyond the boundaries created by a white individualist, cis-heteronormative, able-bodied culture. The institutions that maintain this culture (i.e. school, work, religion, etc.) demand conformity and censure anybody that draws over the lines. My constant pushing back and questioning of the status quo began to threaten my sense of safety and well-being the more I grew. My sense of self bumped against the limits of the compulsory identity that perception of my physical body. Attempted capturing by labels like “weirdo” and “anti-social” only further the frustration of being alone and misunderstood. When I could, I returned to my family and community to replenish my confidence. Like a temporary tattoo, the waves of complicity washed away so much of the foundation I’d built in that safe, secure, supported place.
Backsliding
By the time I got to college, my discomfort and frustration twisted into a constant rage fueled by loss and the isolation of grief. My curiosity, my deviance, my refusal became social exclusion and acute policing, pushing me further away from community. So I went alone, trying to reconcile the queerness of my mind and the Black, female body that was expected to behave in certain ways when entering regulated institutional spaces under the western capitalist order. Just by my body, I am immediately perceived as a threat to the spaces that were designed and maintained as white (and male). Added to that the constant questioning, defiance, and difference in my thinking–my imagination definitely had no space to bloom.
I learned a while back that gender and race are both constructed ideologies that serve in the maintenance of an exclusive culture; regulating narrow lanes and expectations of who and how to be. Especially in the South, these roles and performances are strictly enforced in a cultural setting that on the whole demonizes difference under the threat of violence. Playing your role, dictated by your physical perception, had in the past quite literally been a matter of life and death.
Without the anchor of the community that had once nurtured my expansion and difference, conformity became a matter of protection, self-care, and strategy, no matter how uncomfortable I felt for doing so. I chose to tuck, and nip, and tamp and quell all of the ways, big and small, that I did not fit in. The compulsion for pinks and princesses, for high coverage makeup and fade creams to erase the evidence of melanated skin. I shrank my Blackness to the most imperceptible level, straightening my kinks– earning me the compliments of “being so articulate” or the castigation of “talking like a white girl.” I marked myself as hyperfeminine, binding myself in tight clothes and high heels, cloaking myself in a sensuality that allowed me to enter certain spaces as a more desirable object. I adopted the moniker of ‘The Corporate Black Girl’, priding myself on the artfulness of assimilation into the most limited expression of myself.
As I became savvier in navigating institutional spaces, this conformity, this fitting and blending in turned inwards. I internalized the signals sent daily to be less Black, to be more woman so that I could continue to enjoy the reputation that agreeable Black folks do. My questioning turned inward, building up insecurity and self-disdain that used to be aimed at the institutions I entered and the authorities that protected them. The primming and priming became self-mutilation: perming, thinning, bleaching, pressing out any of that old, expanded sense of self.
Thankfully the revival of the celebration of natural Black hair in the early 2000s, sent a rescue signal to the small piece of authenticity I compartmentalized away for loved ones who helped me to cultivate safe spaces to return to. I was among many Black women who had begun to actively reject white beauty standards, starting with my hair. This was the beginning of a reawakening, a return to the place where I had started, becoming comforted by difference and deviance from a standard that was created to exclude people like me.
“Happiest Hour”
Breaking
This vigor and hunger for radical refusal were further fed by my move from Virginia to New York City. It wasn’t until I moved here that I realized how uncomfortable I was with who I was expected to be. The unfolding and unlearning that took place was fueled by so many others that had found comfort outside the labels and expectations of roles that were never meant to fit the bodies that are deemed too Black, too fluid, too foreign, too much. The fear that I’d internalized of not being able to fit in, of being rejected, or being further misunderstood; the fear that had kept me away from claiming and celebrating a truth that may have always been just beneath the surface of my skin, began to subside. My questioning and curiosity returned, as did my boldness. I felt less comfort and sureness in a Black womanhood defined by others. It was no longer radical enough to simply enter those institutions as a Black female body–I needed my resistance to being more vehement. When I finally settled in that truth, I realized that it wasn’t just my Blackness that didn’t fit, it was also the tension I began to feel between my Blackness and my womanness.
It wasn’t until recently that I came to understand how the gender binary also protects an exclusive, white supremacist status quo. The reduction of human identities to two prescriptive labels is a function of the overarching influence of white supremacist capitalism, which forces us into categories for profit and control. What’s more, is that Blackness in all its forms falls outside of the realm of preference in this system. Blackness is expected to be the opposing fuel, the basis that gives whiteness its form and the object of its “power”; without Blackness, there can be no systematic exclusion or differentiation or standard of comparison.
When you marry Blackness with a binary, you also find an illicit fit. Blackness is a mode of being against which (white) manhood and (white) womanhood were created. Most of us have struggled for a long time with the tension that is Black womanhood, the ill-fitting language of femininity that has been denied and continues to be denied to people who look like me. In navigating this tension, generations before me have had to create their own lanes, frameworks, and communities to prevent being consumed by the world’s refusal to see us.
“The problem of black women’s labor made apparent the gender non-conformity of the black community, its supple and extended modes of kinship, its queer domesticity, promiscuous sociality and loose intimacy, and its serial and fluid conjugal relations…As a consequence, she comes to enjoy a position that is revered and reviled, essential to the endurance of black social life and, at the same time, blamed for its destruction.”
— Sadiya Hartman, The Belly of the World
Burgeoning
Even as my curiosity returned, even as I felt more empowered to refuse the labels, roles, and expectations placed on me, I still turned inwards, questioning my questioning. Wondering whether what I’d learned about the violence of the binary belonged to me. Wondering whether, white, cis-able-bodied heternormativity had wormed its way into my psyche, compelling me to appropriate identities that western capitalism had taught me were consumable.
I had no doubt about my Blackness, my values of community and care, and my spiritual connection to my creators. The learning I’d earned during my time in New York simply gave me the language to articulate who I’d always been. I could trace back to my origins the signals and experiences that were formative.
Queerness was all too foreign. A language of being that I had never even had an inkling of access to in my upbringing. I continued to try to translate memories from the language of limitations into a language of freedom and authenticity. Even as New York had given me the space to unfold my selves, unhitch my masks, and unpin my skins, I still had a tremendous amount of purging and unlearning of even deeper levels of internalized white supremacist notions than I even knew existed. I’m continuing on the journey of learning and allowing my curiosity to grow a sense of fluidity, giving me comfort in naming my queerness.
“I can value and share the love and adoration of Black womanhood within the limitations and celebrations of Black womanhood and still not be within the binary. My ability to be fluid is simply being human.”
— Mare Leon, Leaving the Binary, Keeping Black Womanhood
Last week I read this profound article, by Mariane “Mare” Leon recounting a piece of their journey to leaving the gender binary but maintaining a sense of Black womanhood. Their words affirmed for me that the questioning of my place within the binary was a valid one. The desire I felt to not be captured by categories that were designed against people like me was a true one. The uncomfortability of being called by gender labels and expectations, that my ancestors and siblings today don’t have access to, was warranted. My obstinance in not wanting to separate Black womanhood was affirmed. I could be ‘she’ and ’they’ as I chose. This affirmation allowed me to call to me all the disparate, misshapen pieces of me, those that I’d known so intimately in the beginning but had become twisted and dulled. Again, I found community in language, comfort in reflection, and confidence in knowing that I could be both/and not either/or.
Drunk Palm III 2007, Wangechi Mutu [Source].
In solitude, that space of self-discovery and development I’ve come to know my identity as a series of tensions, between Blackness and womanness, invisibility and (hyper) visibility, joy, and fear, being and unbeing, beauty and beast, in community and solitude, shadow and light, discomfort and liberation. I have “consent not to be a single being,” with these frictions as a superpower protecting me from the boxes, expectations, and limitations of this world. I dance dauntlessly in the direction of not being perceived, outside of the spaces and places of my choosing. I am a shapeshifter, a plural being, because I have always had to be.
