Queer Black people socialized into womanhood, lifelong or not, have long existed. Their role in history has been manifold as icons of feminism, queerness, transness, and intersectionality. Pauli Murray was born in 1910 and from a young age was quoted as "desir[ing] experimentation on the male side" (96). He was one of the first Black people to seek out hormone therapy, though he was denied it continually from the years 1940 to 1944. Socialized as a woman, Murray conceived of Jane Crow and strove to make leaps within the field of feminism as a figurehead. Murray referred to himself with the pronoun s/he in writing or masculine pronouns, himself. Murray spent his life plagued by dualisms and seeking to overcome them. In a poem, he speaks "why is it I am proud of my Negro blood?" And in another:
"oh god! My face has slipped them...
can i endure the killing weight of time it takes them
to be sure?"
"Racial and gender nonconformity explicitly crossed paths on Murray's body, and as s/he walked through the world, others were always taking measure of this dual non belonging" (97-98). In his socialized womanhood, Murray stands as an accomplished feminist and activist for women's rights, but his role as a transgender person in history has been downplayed as he does not fit into a modern perception and a white perception of this role. In fact, "only a handful of scholars have recognized Murray's transgender history, and only [one other] has begun to unpack how those experiences shaped Murray's theoretical analysis of Jane Crow," despite the inextricable link between Black prescribed womanhood and formation and understanding of trans identity both historically and in the present (100). Pauli Murray's legacy as both a Black feminist and a Black transgender man shows how for many transmasculine people, Black womanhood is a defining and core aspect of personhood.
These notions of the white gaze, both created by women and men, leave Black women excluded implicitly from the world of dualisms and dialectics, and othered. Alienated, Black women take on other forms. Black women realize their double consciousness, realize their difference, perhaps their queerness, and assume both, and all gazes. Emerging from Black girlhood into Black adulthood, Black women are emboldened to embrace the notion of escaping the system of gazing into the mirror and reflecting the gaze back. Existing as forms, free to embody masculine and feminine, but not only these traits but to exist outside this binary. Existing as a Black LGBTQ+ person does not mean existing to spite of a culture of gender norms and societal pressures, nor are these factors intrinsically linked. It is merely the presence of queer existence that disrupts these systems inherently and makes apparent their inadequacy for describing the truth of human experience. Judith Butler reflects on the implied notions of gender fluidity in relation to trans identities as mentioned in their book Gender Trouble:
"Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person's felt sense of gender was therefore "unreal." That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be… I only meant to say that we should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization."
The societal perception of us as individuals does not always align with our internal sense of self. Black girlhood here as an experience embodies not the internal sense of self of being a girl or woman, but the societal image thrust upon and created in oneself by one's double consciousness as a Black person raised in the image of womanhood.
Hegel and Lacan both conceptualize of relations to each other and origins of self-consciousness, yet both focus on a phallocentric perspective and subjugate women within their work. I imagine a feminist rework of these concepts in which Hegel's master-slave dialectic reveals the power of the feminine perspective and Lacan's self-defeat is overcome. For Black lesbians, factors such as colorism and racism come into play as well as sexism in deconstructing the myths of womanhood perpetuated by white and Black phalluses; overcoming these structures takes a keen analysis of male dominated viewpoints.
The central writers employed in this text think of gender in sexual terms and in terms of male and female - While not reflective of the actuality of gender experiences in their spectrum, Lacan, Hegel, and Freud, originator of the phallus we find ourselves fixated on, use woman and man in a biological aspect rather than one expressive of gender identities and the range of experiences included under the term woman. To understand these texts, it must be understood that the woman in this case is a person who possesses internal reproductive organs. Much of the focus is placed on the possession or lack of certain genitals. However, Lacan also seeks to abstract the phallus from the penis, and therein lies the potential for sex nonconformity and the concept of the black phallus and "lesbian phallus" (Butler 64). Written in a time where it was especially true that "the matrix of gender relations [exists] prior to the emergence of human," while Lacan and Hegel provide insights on the experience of women and men, they exist within cisnormative societies that supplant ideas of femininity and masculinity into every aspect of being (7).
Hegel subjugates the woman to the role of child bearer and mother; noting this, I turn to the master-slave dialectic and find that "certain passages in the argument employed by Hegel in defining the relation of master to slave apply much better to the relation of man to woman" (de Beauvoir 90). In this hypothetical situation, one "does not see [the bondsman] as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self" (Hegel 630). Considering this relationship from the perspective of a woman in relation to a man, the feminine is always subjugated to the role of the bondsman - however, as Hegel makes clear, this position as bondsman is one of real power.
