Black Women and the Critique of Gender as Category

In 1851, Sojourner Truth’s infamous speech “Ain't I a Woman,” appeared in the Anti-Slavery Bugle of Salem, Ohio after it had been recited in the town before. The speech was a brilliant examination of the hypocrisies of the treatment of Black and white women in American common consciousness. “Ain't I a Woman” stands at the precipice of Black women learning to reclaim the identity of “woman” as something that can be weaponized and mobilized behind. “Woman,” not as a biological gender orientation but rather as a political argument, allows for those under the umbrella of “Black Woman” such as Michelle Obama, Megan Thee Stallion and Serena Williams, to recontextualize the category of woman that exists, but also to assert what they consider to be an intrinsic truth — that Black women are, in fact, women.

This truth has been historically proven through a variety of factors, including but not limited to biological factors, familial and labor-based roles, bodily presentation and sexual proximity to men. For the Black women who choose to find themselves well within the category of woman, the term serves as an empowering tool to create community and situate themselves within the larger Black and female communities. But for a growing percentage of Black non-binary, trans and gender non-conforming people, “woman” has become a category of much contempt, laden with questions regarding history and intention. Black scholars such as Hari Ziyad and Akwaeke Emezi look far beyond the categories of woman and man in an effort to examine the colonial histories of gender binaries to begin to answer the post-modern question of what role gender can truly play in the Black community if we seek to imagine liberatory futures for ourselves.

Black womanhood presents itself through inherent nonconformity — it is incapable of being “woman” in the way white women are women or Black in the way that Black men are Black. It is more than intersectionality — it is an inherent rebellion. It is a refusal to be confined or defined within the categories and binaries that colonialism has implicated us within. Blackness is fundamentally unidentifiable in all of its tenants, making the binaries presented by the Western world largely unusable and inapplicable to the identities of Black women. Post-raciality has been frequently understood as a synonym of color-blind thinking, but it also has the incredible ability of imagining what Black people could be outside of the fictive realities of race. Modern post-racial, post-temporal and post-humanist thought has begun to reimagine Blackness not as the corporal state of Black people but rather as a phenomenon that occurs separately from the racialised embodiment process. In other words, it is an examination of the ways Blackness is different from Black people. Race, as an imagined social construct largely understood to have been created to subjugate people of color in an oppressive hierarchical system, becomes complicated when thinking of the real implications of this imaginary. Race is a biologically unsound idea with very real consequences. Post-racial thinking, then, has the potential to question what Black people could be, and have always been, apart from the histories of colonial categorisation. This is to say, it is a practice of decolonial thought.

Similarly, thinking of the post-lives of gendered existence has more to do with reconciling with legacies of colonialism than it does the beliefs of cis women. This is not to say that there is no such thing as a Black woman, or a lesbian Black woman, or an American Black woman, but rather, to provoke the need and utilization of colonial definitions that could never possibly fully account for all that Black women are. In Ziyad’s essay “My Gender is Black,” they explain that gender in Black diaspora is inherently nonconformist because “Black gender and anyone who embraces its margins were never supposed to exist comfortably in this world in the first place.” Binary ways of thinking impose an expectation of gender performance that stands in the way of their achievement of a decolonial Black subjectivity. The argument that Black people should abandon gendered constructs lies between the personal and the political. On one hand, feminists since the 60s have been saying that “the personal is the political,” and the attempt to sever the two is an outright refusal to understand women's, and all people’s, personhood, and subjectivity. On the other hand, however, there is another aspect of the relationship between personal and political — a way that someone can politically abide by an ideal or stance without personally associating themselves with it. This is to say, how can an explicit distancing from gender, on the level of the individual, be a political decision made from the examination of gender as a social construct and not a way of expressing one’s own bodily relationship with the gender binary? The subject, then, becomes dispossessed from the body twice — once as they realize the inability of colonial definitions to fully understand their body and the way it moves through the world, and a second time as they force themselves to sever the personal from the political to serve as someone more than an ally. Instead, they become someone with active skin in the game and something to lose if an examination of gender is not conducted.

I in no way wish to admonish Black women for identifying with womanhood or femininity, but, rather, to critique the requirement for our bodies and souls to be made palatable to white people in a world which is defined through the lens of their whiteness. As to Ziyad, “to argue that ‘my gender is Black’ is not to ignore our different experiences within Blackness, or to erase the unique struggles of different gender nonconforming individuals,” it is instead a reaching towards more structuralist critiques of colonial categories of confinement. Because Black women “are pressured to force our way into categories that weren’t just not made for us, but designed specifically for our exclusion,” the process of (un)becoming requires a lack of adherence to gender. (Un)becoming as a necessity for true subjectivity is a politicized process that serves to be “disruptive, unreliable, puzzled and puzzling” in the same way that agendered thinking is inherently a disruption to the normative way of conceiving the world. To identify as a woman while not identifying with the feminine does question the traits of gender, but it does not fully include the problematization of the category of women in the first place. (Un)becoming requires that we undertake the project of de-biologizing Blackness in a genuine effort to give Afro-diasporic people the rights to their own definitions.