"But You're Not at All like Bertha": Contemporary (Black) Trans Studies and Richard Wright's "Man of All Work"

Abstract

While transgender has served as a kind of umbrella term in recent years for cross-identifying subjects, I think the inclusivity of its appeal has made it quite unclear as to what the term might mean and for whom . . . . [W]e have hardly begun to recognize the forms of embodiment that fill out the category of transgenderism, and before we dismiss it as faddish [as some have done], we should know what kind of work it does, whom it describes, and whom it validates. Transgender proves to be an important term not to people who want to reside outside categories altogether but to people who want to place themselves in the way of particular forms of recognition. Transgender may in-deed be considered a term of relationality; it describes not simply an identity but a relation between people, within a community, or within intimate bonds. set: to historicize and contemporize lesbian and gay fiction, and provide a context in which to de-scribe the tradition of African-American gay and lesbian literature while setting the precedent of marrying the two. Cutting a swath from the canon of African-American literature gives a certain gloss to our writing as being part of the African-American literary tradition. (Introduction xxi-xxii;