This dissertation argues for an ethical investment in the flourishing of black trans women. It builds on the ongoing work of womanist and black theological ethics and draws from the personal narratives of black trans women. Carrying forward the black ethical tradition, this project recognizes black trans women and their lived experiences as an ethical source from which a unique, ethical posture emerges: ploughing. Necessitated by a social context that understands black trans feminine existence as abject and expendable, this ethical posture is a necessarily dynamic and laborious movement through life that resists and disrupts the moral ground thereby revealing and creating new moral possibilities in the process. Ploughing shows how the everyday experiences of black trans existence embody moral postures of resistance to heteropatriarchal systems of surveillance and violence. Ploughing denotes a series of ethical postures that generate alternate moral capacities that embrace embodiment and underscore the centrality of community.
Focusing on respectability politics, its influence on black (Christian) religious spaces, and the operations of Black Sexual Panopticism (BSP), a system wherein black sexuality is acculturated through surveillance, chapters 1 and 2 examine the long history of social narratives that regulated and disciplined black movement and sexuality in ways that later targeted black trans femininity. Chapter 3 turns to black aesthetics. It examines blues culture and its links to black gospel through gesture and performance, introducing interstitial performativity as a glimpse of the moral potential within black-constituted spaces that affirm black erotic expression. The remaining chapters develop ethical postures through the metaphor of ploughing, highlighting distinctive features of black trans women’s existence. Drawing on published personal narratives, Chapter 4 outlines the social realities that confine and relegate black trans femininity in service of oppressive demands for social order. Chapter 5 identifies four ethical postures -- claiming pleasure, humble un/knowing, incessant becoming, and “no mind” ethos -- that coalesce to form ploughing. These postures irrupt social expectations and forge new moral trails in the process. This project recognizes black trans women as moral exemplars largely overlooked in Christian ethics, and the moral imperative to prioritize black trans feminine futures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/42639 |
| Date | 26 May 2021 |
| Creators | Beamon, Benae Alexandria |
| Contributors | Rambo, Shelly |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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