Treva Ellison: Black Trans Reproductive Labor

In their talk, “Black Trans Reproductive Labor,” Treva Ellison builds on scholarship and activism that theorizes black queer and trans history and politics in relationship to racial capitalism. The lecture thinks through how black trans and gender non-conforming people have been positioned and imagined in relation to the carceral state. It considers the role that positioning plays in the reproduction of social relations of racial capitalism: the re-iteration of the color line as one that fragments class politics, and the deployment of gender normativity as a mode of building class power and inhabiting racial progress.

Using archival examples from research on queer criminality in Los Angeles, the talk contextualizes three stories in which black trans and gender non-conforming people come into archival view not only in the context of work and labor, but also through their interface with the carceral state. The stories include a report of three black domestic workers arrested for cross-dressing in 1949, Sir Lady Java’s fight against the Los Angeles Police Commission in 1967, and the LAPD murder Laverne Turner, a black gender non-conforming young person, in 1970.

These stories emphasize how vital the racialization of space is to articulations of queer criminality; why labor and capital are (still) necessary for theorizing black trans and queer positionality; and why intersectional and inter-disciplinary approaches to the carceral geographies help to expand our understanding of how racial capitalism operates.

Recorded on October 19, 2017 at Barnard College in NYC. Organized by New Directions in American Studies at Barnard College and the MA Program in American Studies at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University. Co-sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College.