Articles by Marshall (Kai M.) Green
Short Takes: Signs Journal , 2018
Biography, 2018
A key feature of Black liberation under the frame of the Movement for Black Lives is an insistenc... more A key feature of Black liberation under the frame of the Movement for Black Lives is an insistence on acknowledging trauma and prioritizing a healing justice framework, challenging the death grip our current capitalist system has on the quality of Black lives by offering up tools for healing. We work to forge a healing-centered praxis that is invested in both individual and struc- tural transformation. This healing work is a process, and through the pro- cess we learn much about social, political, and economic structures, alongside our role in shaping, reshaping, or even dismantling those structures. These processes produce the context of Black living and our current understand- ings of Black life. In the following staged dialogue we, members of BYP100’s Healing & Safety Council, wish to highlight some of the work we do in the name of Black liberation and healing that draws from Black radical and Black feminist traditions, both of which inform the current articulation of a Black queer feminist lens, the platform that grounds the work of BYP100 (BYP100, “About”).
The Feminist Wire, 2018
We write this piece to add to the collective record of institutional harms as documented by Black... more We write this piece to add to the collective record of institutional harms as documented by Black feminist scholars like Barbara Christian, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Cathy J. Cohen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Barbara Ransby, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, E. Patrick Johnson, June Jordan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Joy James, Brittney Cooper, Charlene Carruthers, Mark Anthony Neal, Ntozake Shange and a whole host of other Black feminists who have spoken out in times of crises. Our Black queer feminist ancestor Ntozake Shange calls us to recognize the cyclical nature of radical struggles for liberation. Shange asks us to reexamine how we survive and consider that there is more for us to manifest than survival. Shange calls us to sing out the nature of our oppression in all the spaces we inhabit–wherever and whenever we are located.
This conversation meditates on the ways in which Black Feminism and Trans Feminism relate to one ... more This conversation meditates on the ways in which Black Feminism and Trans Feminism relate to one another, how they speak to and supplement one another, and how they are in fact constitutive. Considering that Black feminism, historically, has attempted to interrogate the capaciousness of the very term “woman” and to gender, if you will, an androcentric “Blackness,” one might say, as Che Gossett has said, that Black feminism is “always already trans.” The present conversation, taking place via e-mail from October of 2015 to October of 2017, is a dialogue conducted by Black feminist scholars that deeply engages prevailing notions of Blackness and transness, and radicalizes how these are understood with respect to feminism. In short, it is a conversation in Black, in trans, in feminism, and offers different conceptions of how Black and trans and feminism work with and through one another.
In this afterword, Kai M. Green asks us to think about the stakes of trans* visibi... more In this afterword, Kai M. Green asks us to think about the stakes of trans* visibility in the academy and beyond.
W e are in a time labeled the " transgender tipping point, " a period characterized by the scalin... more W e are in a time labeled the " transgender tipping point, " a period characterized by the scaling up of legal protections, visibility, rights, and politics centered on transgender people. The contemporary visual landscape is populated with the bodies of Black women. How does the language and discourse of the tipping point elide the presence of a saturation of Black bodies? In academia this elision has taken the shape of the expansion and institutionalization of trans-gender studies as a discipline. We are interested in what happens to the category of transgender as it becomes routed through the logics and power lines of institu-tionality and the metrics of administration. This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is the product and process of our attempt to think through how the institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline functions as a scene of subjection for blackness —for Black people and places. We have engaged multiple fields in this issue, and these various intellectual quandaries all signal the simultaneous institutionalization of transgender studies alongside the heightened visibility of transgender people in our current popular and political landscapes. We are interested in the ways that these two simultaneous occurrences affect one another. Black transwomen and transwomen of color have sparked the interests of many because of popular figures like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock; at the same time, there has also been a lot more awareness around Black transwomen's relationship to premature death. Though the popular representation of fabulousness and the crises of the trans subject are represented primarily by Black transwomen and transwomen of color, the field of transgender studies, like other fields, seems to use this Black subject as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things.
Kai M. Green stages a conversation between black lesbian feminism and transgender studies. Throug... more Kai M. Green stages a conversation between black lesbian feminism and transgender studies. Through a series of close readings of editorials by Alycee Lane that appeared in Black Lace, a black lesbian erotic magazine, he demonstrates how black lesbian as a Trans* modifier of feminism indexes the contradiction of (white) feminist exclusion of black women, while simultaneously forging a space for the expansion of the category “woman.” Through a Trans* reading of black lesbian feminist texts, he demonstrates the productivity of Trans* as a method or optic that refuses temporal or spatial fixity to rethink the category of “woman” beyond cisgender black women.
This essay is a critical and creative meditation on the process of making my ethnographic film It... more This essay is a critical and creative meditation on the process of making my ethnographic film It Gets Messy in Here (2011), a thirty-two- minute short documentary that examines the experiences of Black and Asian American transgender men and masculine of center queer women in public bathrooms. This essay explicates a Trans* and TransFeminist approach to filmmaking, a transformative film praxis that has the ability to move people to a higher level of self-consciousness about their place in the world and the systems that produce that place. This essay explores an intersubjective and self-reflexive approach to scholarship in hopes that it might produce new knowledge about and for the communities being studied, but also new epistemological platforms for that very knowledge.
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TS... more This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 19, Number 4, 2013, pp. 568-569 (Article)
Teaching Documents by Marshall (Kai M.) Green
is a shape-shifting Black Queer Feminist nerd; an Afro-Future, freedom-dreaming, rhyme-slinging d... more is a shape-shifting Black Queer Feminist nerd; an Afro-Future, freedom-dreaming, rhyme-slinging dragon slayer in search of a new world; a scholar, poet, facilitator, filmmaker; and an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at The University of Delaware. Green explores questions of Black sexual and gender agency, health, creativity, and resilience in the context of state and social violence. An interdisciplinary scholar, Green employs Black feminist theory, visual culture, performance studies, and trans studies to investigate Black queer forms of self-representation and communal methods of political mobilization. He combines scholarship, art and activism in his research on race, gender, and sexuality in Black queer communities and cultural production. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity with specializations in Gender Studies and Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Green is a former postdoctoral fellow in Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University and winner of the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships. Green has published and edited work in GLQ: Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Black Camera, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. He is currently completing his memoir, A Body Made Home: They Black Trans Love (The Feminist Press). He is a proud founding member of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) where he sat on The Healing and Safety Council. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter: @drDrummerBoiG 2. Course Description Course Catalog Description This course will interrogate how Black identity shapes conceptions of womanhood and manhood over space and time. In particular, we will examine the varied ways that Black people have defined, understood, and challenged individual and communal notions of femininity and masculinity. In doing so, we will consider how a gendered analysis shapes our understanding of family, power, sexuality, activism, and resistance. Focusing on a range of scholarly interventions from classic as well as recent texts, we will explore major themes and developments in the interpretation of Black gender history.
WGSS 380: Freedom Dreams, Afro-Futures, & Visionary Fictions (Spring 2018) Syllabus
Williams Col... more WGSS 380: Freedom Dreams, Afro-Futures, & Visionary Fictions (Spring 2018) Syllabus
Williams College
Syllabus for WGSS 380: Freedom Dreams, Afro-Futures, & Visonary Fictions (Fall 2018)
Williams Co... more Syllabus for WGSS 380: Freedom Dreams, Afro-Futures, & Visonary Fictions (Fall 2018)
Williams College
[In this course we will examine the various ways Black scholars, artists, & writers, use science fiction and visionary fiction to imagine freedom and new world orders. We will focus on the role of history, particularly slavery, in the Black radical imagination. Freedom is the keyword throughout the course. ]
Papers by Marshall (Kai M.) Green
Into the Darkness examines the ways in which Black queer folk articulate, create, and (re)constru... more Into the Darkness examines the ways in which Black queer folk articulate, create, and (re)construct, Quare space and place in Los Angeles from 1981 to the present. I use the term Quare, a term coined by E. Patrick Johnson, as it is an act of (re)membering a simultaneous articulation of blackness and queerness. Quare signals a range of possible subjectivities that include and exceed the limits of LGBT. In 1981, the crises that Black people experienced in Los Angeles because of rising incarceration rates, unemployment, drug addiction and gang violence, were further compounded by the arrival of HIV/AIDS. While there was much silence and stagnation in response to HIV/AIDS, there were Black queer folk in South Los Angeles who provided knowledge, support, community, and life saving opportunities for themselves and their communities. This dissertation reveals some of those Quare struggles in South Los Angeles. Darkness is an instructive framework, a scale that helps us to understand the re...
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2017
In this afterword, Kai M. Green asks us to think about the stakes of trans* visibility in the aca... more In this afterword, Kai M. Green asks us to think about the stakes of trans* visibility in the academy and beyond.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2017
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Articles by Marshall (Kai M.) Green
Teaching Documents by Marshall (Kai M.) Green
Williams College
Williams College
[In this course we will examine the various ways Black scholars, artists, & writers, use science fiction and visionary fiction to imagine freedom and new world orders. We will focus on the role of history, particularly slavery, in the Black radical imagination. Freedom is the keyword throughout the course. ]
Papers by Marshall (Kai M.) Green
Williams College
Williams College
[In this course we will examine the various ways Black scholars, artists, & writers, use science fiction and visionary fiction to imagine freedom and new world orders. We will focus on the role of history, particularly slavery, in the Black radical imagination. Freedom is the keyword throughout the course. ]