The Transfeminine Mystique
The Five of Swords and Tranifesting a Decan for the Dolls
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Dear reader,
I am not a spectacle, so I’m no hero.
Heroism locates its virtue in the bodies that retain and display an integrity of form. And their displayed corporeal form is positioned as pleasurable spectacle. By their actionable body the heroic narrative of becoming is pursued. These bodies are pro-filmic, that is placed in front of and captured on camera, then used to measure the progress, failure and/or success of a physical mastery that actively reinstates equilibrium. The hero may not be human but as a displayed icon of physicality, power, gender and race they reify a Western human body that is read as white, able-bodied, cisgender. Thus they edify a hierarchy of humanity. These paradigms posit that only these liberal bodies may be exceptional, agentive, whole, or heroic. Our fantasies of empowerment, through the site of such a body, are made physical, legible, knowable.
When we vie for visibility and representation it is the hero we want to be seen as. But so incessantly we, the trans femmes of color, are only known in narratives of victimization. The ubiquity of our visibility being restricted to scenes of extreme violence has us wanting to “go to the camera and die,”1 to claim the evidentiary function of the camera’s gaze for our first-hand testimony of horrific assault that is so consistently met with incredulity. Iyanna Dior, in asserting her desire to die on camera, determines to dictate the terms the violence against her, a young Minneapolis Black trans woman attacked during the fervor of the George Floyd protests in June 2020, will be made visible, communicated and considered. The camera’s gaze is cannibalizing so we must insist on upending it, insist on other modes of representation beyond overdetermined violent constraints. Still it’s precarious.
Ongoing marginalization works by keeping you craving recognition, healing and protection from the systems and people portrayed as powerful, important. We fall for fool’s gold, we bite into the apple. We invest hope in the current legislature and judiciary and we’ve went through the wrong door. A victim of crime is much more sympathetic than the criminal, but cosigning a legal system that cages and exiles so that we might be recast as “good” in the public eye does not actually keep us safe from the stigmas of transphobia or homophobia.2 When the law only recognizes anti-trans violence as an individual hate crime it obscures the structural violence of incarceration, and the barred accessibility that comes with documentation clarifies that hate crime laws don’t actually help trans people, but rather bolsters a surveillance state that targets us.
If you look at the card of crime and punishment its clear that we need more methods for responding to violence, alternative relations to the camera, to self-documentation, representation and internal recognition.
A paradigmatic exile is portrayed in the Five of Swords. A flaming haired figure banishes the two who are turned away, one with their head in their hands overwhelmed by the body of water they stand before. The central character here has a mocking presence. Like a cop who has deadnamed these departing souls, we catch him grinning as he commits onticide. He strips them of title and territory, rendering an effective social death. We do not know them because they navigate a negative axis of being. The human is made from these social antagonisms, from the black transfemme that “exists to not exist.”3
This is the card of abjection. Robert Philips explains that
“Abjection refers to the vague sense of horror that permeates the boundary between the self and the other. In a broader sense, the term refers to the process by which identificatory regimes exclude subjects that they render unintelligible or beyond classification. As such, the abjection of others serves to maintain or reinforce boundaries that are threatened...Abjection literally means ‘to cast out,’ yet Kristeva’s theorization plays with this definition by recognizing that in the context of marginalized subjects, abjection goes beyond ‘casting out’ and becomes a more interactive process through which the boundaries of the self are protected by rejecting whatever ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’4
The cops and the colonized enact a subjective identity as a defensive construction because they don’t know what to do with my designer pu$$y. Being at the proverbial borderline as trans bodies, beings and subjectivities are, our ambiguity is horrifying. Trans*bodies provoke cishet anxiety about the integrity of the body. There is a primal cultural fear of the mutating, transmogrifying human form. Trans embodiment violates boundaries.
I’m a doll. I’m a shapeshifting assassin. I’m a villain with a virtual body with a wide array of disturbing representative possibilities. I’m Mystique in this bitch. I claim my monstrosity and I want to write a poetics that displaces the reader and dooms the spectator to a perpetual state of perceptual crisis.
I may be a mutant who bears the mark of the exile but my monstrous being is the body fantastic foreseeing the future. This is no conceit if we consider that “monster” derives from the Latin noun monstrum meaning “divine portent,”itself branching from the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” Susan Stryker writes likewise about her trans body as a monstrously powerful place, outside of the natural order, claiming and channeling her rage to alchemize the suffering of an outcast into the fuel for self-affirmation, moral agency and affective political action. She tells us monsters signal the numinous:
It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”5
Some time has passed since Stryker spoke about her trans body as resonant with the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but the yellow eyes open in me are more like the blue-scaled skin biological phenom. My hair's not red but it is Raven and like Ms. Darkhölme my mutability is marked as less knowable, less predictable and therefore more threatening within a representational economy. She, like me, is a figure of visual uncertainty. She is my Saturn in Aquarius, my Seven of Swords Mater of ontological and phenomenological duplicity. She succeeds not by rejecting her mutant being but by harnessing her camouflaging adaptability to harness her rage against the conditions in which she struggles to exist.
There’s this scene in the first X-Men film where Mystique, posing as a white liaison to a white U.S. senator, reveals, with her visual signature of a wave of blue scales washing over her bare body, to be a mutant, and a woman. The danger she presents stirs a transphobic anxiety as a villain who tricks the man into the thinking she is someone else. This sense of ontological and phenomenological duplicity is meant to question the bodies we tend to tolerate. Her appearance is profoundly unstable but her purpose isn’t. Her political disobedience is doubled by her visible transition, defying the systemic order’s borders, refusing to adhere to clear definition of race, gender and sex. And yet as her transfemmness becomes so visible in this scene she isn’t attacked but subdues the legislator working to pass a “Mutant Registration Act” in Congress that would force mutants to disclose their identities and abilities.
The imagery, the astrology and the real world application of this tarot card make this ongoing dilemma at once academic, artistic and deeply personal. Transfemmes of color deal with injunctions to make themselves readily available for public scrutiny but our public display always exceeds our consent.
By the means of our embodiment we are seen as less than fully human and so we suffer an exclusion from human community. Like Eve or Lilith she is a serpent woman kicked out of paradise.
She articulates herself as a trans woman of color beyond death, abjection or extreme violence. And it’s not that she doesn’t navigate violence, she does, with an ardent and capacious self-defense. Her embodiment encourages us to engage more meaningfully with anti-trans violence via anti-trans legislation and phobic legislators.
If we linger with how she holds her abjection we can deconstruct violence to imagine new types of relations whereby we join together not as victims of hate crimes, but as active challengers to colluding forces of fascism, connecting in a trans*national solidarity to war against the ruling class.
And mine is a transfeminine Mystique, because unlike Stryker or some trans folks who have medically transitioned, I have no hormonal agenda or surgical techniques to refigure my flesh, for one type of materiality is precluded by another, the financial means to do so. But for me being trans is less about moving from one pole of the gender-bio binary to the other than gaily running up and down the scales of the spectrum. I often wish I was intersex if only to further elide being defined by a phallicized scopophilia. But may my words reveal the seams and sutures of our shared fabricated social construction just the same.
I knew I was transfemme because it was her I always I engaged and identified with, her fictional materiality convinced me of my own. But my powers were pronounced prior to puberty. As a kid I could never outrun the accusations that accosted me. I wore words that others read on me before I learned about consent. I was clocked by the sway of my gait, or the clarity of my skin, the sensitivity of my attention, the eloquence of my elocution. I was always femme but before I knew I was trans I was called a fag. In elementary, middle, high school, in undergrad I was schooled in the ways the West thinks of itself as masculine and constructs Western gender to rely upon the abjection of non-western genders, that emasculation is synonymous with imperialism, so that the East is feminine, weak but wise, delicate but poor, dominated by a military via a militant masculinity.
And then for the enslaved, masculinity becomes the means they meditate emancipation upon, mediating the transfiguration of the slave into a man, leaving the femme to stand most fully in the ungendered flesh. The slave is a stranger whose flesh is made fungible so that black gender is made incoherent. The gendered labor divisions that explicitly define white society do not apply to the labor demands put upon black bodies, irrespective of gender.
Again, I’m no hero. I have my own quest, my own motivations and my body is more virtual than material though it exerts and endures. The highest point in my chart, the most socially visible aspect of my constitution bears the mark of the exile.
But can exile ever be emancipation?
Heteronormativity despises me because I undo the bo[d]y’s order. I mean I’ve always been iridescent. The Sun hits my skin just so and bitches are blinded, they never understand, not knowing if I’m a woman or a man. In my fluidity is freedom, though my ambivalent figure has to ride waves of gender dysphoria against an incessant alienation, I take pride in breaching the grip of gender and race. Of course Mystique would appear as a man when the mission called for that corporeal condition but she was always underneath. Perhaps this fiction is inspired by the history of transfemmes who, in their fearing arrest for ‘cross-dressing’, would pass as a man in public to evade police, but at home would reconnect her gender dimensions that were disarticulated, with pleasure and pride. And as woman, she would emancipate herself once more. She ruptures the attempts to actualize a male gendered freedom, and productively so.
A nonbinary femmeness has no ontological reality. Therefore it can dispel the illusions that gender normativity and respectability could keep us safe. So the dolls, and the Black dolls especially, unsettle the linear temporality of attempting to transform fungible flesh into a neatly gendered citizen.
When a transfemme person chooses to embrace themselves they confront these cages of identity and reckon with ungendering. They are marked by and mark unbecoming, and in this poetic of unbecoming is a politic that pulls apart the social fabric to insist it better serve her. To get free from the trap that is set for me, which is to exist on my own terms, I embolden a relational ethic wherein you, and any other, are affirmed in your own embodied complexities and contradictions. We stand in mutual awareness without either perceiving a threat to either’s bodily claims. Then we exceed relying on the body as the central basis for relation. But still we theorize from the flesh. Without skin in the game all that’s left is apathy.
So as a praxis the first decan of Aquarius via the Five of Swords tells us of the violence of being marked. It refuses to bypass the brutality incumbent upon this social position but it also maintains the generative capacities of standing with/ in female flesh ungendered.
If we think through a Black transfemininity as rupture6, of the social fabric by their bodies that violate the borders of gender, that embody the violent antagonisms that comprise the human, then we can also think of Black transfemininity as practicing “a form of radical political and intellectual production that takes place at the crossroads of trauma, injury, and the potential for material transformation and healing,”7 also known as tranifesting.
Tranifesting starts with the embodied, individual experience to then generate a praxis, a politic that is flexible enough to mobilize through rupture, across contradiction, athwart division to exceed the State’s strategies of containment so as to align ourselves in critical action necessary for social trans*formation.
Tranifesting is not rigid but flexible in its operations and in the collectivities it coheres. Through relating various modes of consciousness, sites of struggle, rituals, representations and embodiments we clarify our capacity to cross the violating, normativizing configurations of identity and circumvent the process that rejects and excludes.
White supremacy depends on division. The Five of Swords would aim to position us in conflict with other so as to foreclose the possibilities of trans-national, cross-racial solidarities. In the hierarchies of humanity none of these communities would claim us then. The practice of a Black transfemininity invests instead in building bridges, attending to the specificities of our distinct racializations and their unique production of gender within each of our communities.
So as we tranifest the decan associated with this card, the first face of Aquarius, a portrait of Venus, we can turn away from pessimistic antirelationality with a fervent hope that on the other side our queerness will not be cause for excommunication but rather constitute a utopic collectivity. A critical trans*imagination believes that beyond the damnation of apocalypse we can enliven a future that sustains a worthwhile living.
The two figures pushed to the margins of the card show us the decan holds simultaneously precarity and possibility. And that they are together we know that nonbinary femininity champions a deliberate relational ethic that breaks the valuation of certain live over others, of making winners or losers, villains or victims. Turned away and with their head in their hands the subjects experience a crisis of meaning as they approach the liminal, as meaning collapses. Stripping away the boundaries between external and internal, a queerness is revealed and in that the possibility for transformation. To be trans*embodied is to be offered strategies that are seemingly contrary. We choose to make ourselves something that others would make monstrous, vile, yet we perceive it as producing life saving relations.
Transitioning is not just an individual coming into being, nor coming into transrelation but more largely building a frame of reference for a global fight for freedom. We never stop transitioning for we won’t ever arrive at some final sense of self. Identity is messy and incomplete but if we don’t tether our theorizing to the material conditions of the marginalized we’d be erasing the dynamic potential to be in relationship politically, historically.
The Five of Swords is an image asking for intervention. Repurpose the apparent pain to enact a critical care, a radical regard, and a social critique. Ultimately we are unable to control our public image or its meanings. We can’t control the circumstances in which we are compelled to appear and certain images don’t intent to document social appearance but to demolish it. Even the most self-actualizing photographic portraiture exists within a haunted history of a crude camera lens that only wants to image criminals, compile ethnographic illustrations or comprise a medical case study. The State doesn’t just kill us by attacking our image, it attempts to erase our entire history. We are made hypervisible to be violated. The Five of Swords, as an image, calls for visual activism by acknowledging the role of visual aesthetics in the historical maintenance of racial capitalism. In the struggle to be seen is the desire for solidarity.
To transform the trans image into something self-fashioned, appearing as we desire to be seen, also incurs advocacy for the black dolls, using the images to raise awareness but also to mobilize resources, creating literal and symbolic capital, for our wellbeing. While a documentary photographer, or the mechanical gaze of colonization passively captures its subjects, an active visual of the dolls does the work of building literal, metaphoric and relational value, supporting psychosocial well-being. It affords the subject some control over their framing, inviting participants in their own representation. There are models I turn to, Zanele Muholi (which I will be centering primarily in an upcoming course under construction), Robert Hamlin, Gideon Mendel, FAKA, all visual activists in South Africa for example. I consider how Robert Hamlin, a white, middle-class trans man collaborated with the Sistaaz Hood, a black trans women sex worker support group to create a joint body of images that empowers and motivates movement building.
The image above is blurred by a long exposure. It obscures the women’s male-presenting bodies, while symbolizing the ways in which they perform by the visible movement, while also refuting the fixed forms of identity. Hamblin shares insight about the form and process that produced The Sistaaz Hood portraits:
“And then, how do you want me to look at you? What do you want me to see? They were all like ‘well we’re sex workers, so we want to be sexy, um, you have to pay us if you want to take off our clothes, we want to take our clothes off, because we are poor, we are never going to be able to alter our bodies, but people think we’re crazy when we tell them that we’re women, so we want to show that we don’t have breasts, we’re not ashamed of being poor, or that we’re never going to be able to have breasts, we’re not crazy, we know we don’t have breasts. So, that was one of the elements, I had to show that, and then we spoke a lot about the performances they do when they are doing sex work. There’s a lot of movement involved, so they have to perform, to obscure, to obscure, you know, their male bodies, so that’s where the movement came from.”8
Tarot reading is a type of tranifesting to inhabit the world differently. Over the years and with so many clients, a visual language develops so we can actually communicate and collaboratively craft a visual representation of our being with images without vying for verisimilitude. To see each other in the visual representations offered in the tarot is to sustain a transformation in relation, in self-understanding and each other.
Tarot reading is not a voyeuristic encounter and should not pursued as such. Tarot radically unsettles the boundary between self and other. Our bodies are a carnival. A reading is really a reporting, a relating and recording of someone’s story. And readings are always unauthorized. These cards are are a means of identification but they aren't to be held as ID card portraits, licenses, that force us to be rendered visible, unveiled, legible to the State, permitted to cross borders or otherwise be denied citizenship. The tarots visuals provide multiplicity and difference, a choreography of presence by the way it reflects a variety of querents. Therefore they are not static though the cards themselves may be mechanically reproduced. They elicit a recognition of identity while simultaneously attesting to its flux.
So many in the tarot tableau confront the gaze in their full frontal display with a profound ambivalence. They provide the stage for an imaginative excess wherein we can dethrone and defy heteronormative injunctions and strictures on self-expression, self-invention. When we are likewise obliged to meet the camera’s eye to be classified we can return the gaze with a posture of defiance to transform the image from within. With eyes wide open we can communicate a challenge, an inquisition, or a mix of indifference, indictment, disdain and hostility to the colonial camera enterprise. Or concentrate our stare beyond the confines of the frame, escaping complete capture.
And then For the brown, red, and black transfemme diviners like me tarot reading is a clandestine affair, a type of ephemeral self-authorship as you cut the cards to claim the monstrosity of a female who dares to name herself.
x,
Christopher
Iyanna Dior, 2020. “Every Voice Matters!” Black Transwomen, June 5. YouTube video, 15:01.
Dean Spade, ‘Their Laws Will Never Make Us Safer’, in PRISONS WILL NOT PROTECT YOU. (ed. Ryan Conrad) (AK Press 2012).
Calvin Warren, “Onticide : Afropessimism, Queer Theory, & Ethics”, Issue 367 of Camas Books Zine Library, Camas Books, 2018.
Robert Philips, “Abjection” in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 1, Numbers 1–2.
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing the Transgender Rage”, 247.
Nathan Alexander Moore, A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory, edited by Abraham B. Weil, Francisco J. Galarte, and Jules Gill-Peterson in “The Shape of Trans Yet to Come,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (10:3-4).
Kai M. Green, Treva C. Ellison, “Tranifest” in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 1, Numbers 1–2.
Hamblin, Robert. 2016. Interview, Cape Town, November.