The Trans*-Ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-Ness

Blackness marks a “break in the passage of syntagmatic movement from one more or less stable property to another, as in the radical disjuncture between ‘African’ and ‘American, ' " says Spillers. Blackness rests in the in-between, and this “between” is also a movement of flight, of escape, of fugitivity from the confines of ontological pinning down. The pinning down requires fixation and definable locations, but as in-between, blackness is that elusive interstitiality. Characterized as a “spooky action, " Moten and Harney enunciate the para-ontological sociality of blackness, and by own extension, trans-ness. They write: what one might call the social life of things is important only insofar as it allows us to imagine that social life is not a relation between things but is, rather, that field of rub and rupture that works, that is the work of, no one, nothing, in its empathic richness.