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By: Chaz Barracks, PhD

In a poignant dialogue between two Black trans women who are media influencers, TS Madison and Alexis Sno Legend refuse the respectability politics and binary thinking that often constrain mainstream Black queer representation. Together, they demonstrate how Black queer people reclaim agency and use the digital space to perform and be their true selves. Their media presence in this clip highlights Black queer identity uniquely shaped by intersecting forces—race, class & leisure, and gender/ed systems of power & possibility.

They take me back to the homeplace cultivated by the Black women who raised me. Their conversations, storytelling performances, and the ordinary rituals of cooking, caring, and village-making through mutual aid before folks used the term, were never simply domestic acts; they were practices of world-building. In those moments, they affirmed themselves and one another against the logics that demanded our diminishment

I embody this energy through the ways I live as a femme-fag-sissy. All the names I’ve been called—and catcalled—have shifted in meaning as I, alongside other queer femmes, have grown into my truest self. I learned that power from the homes of single mothers and aunties.

Black women of various gender identities nurtured and made a home for my faggotry to form. Literally and metaphorically, the ways tea is poured, shared, and spilled in many Black households is foundationally countercultural, what southern Black studies recognizes as quare; peculiar and Black in the same ways me and my chosen will get together and kiki, holding deep the embodiment of the spirits of the women-centered households where we came to be. 

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The girls and gwurls gathering in my Aunty’s kitchen where there was miraculously always enough room and plates plus some to-go, was simultaneously a mundane event, as it was a spectacular performance of Black quare spectacle. One that stopped anti-Black time. This specific “transfer” of femininity-to-femme in everyday Black matter, conjures notions of being that gwurl, in a Black home. This embodiment, while it is subjected to navigating all the system’s holdings on us, yet, through intersectional femme care and joy-making, we build modes of freedom practice in the every day. This is deeply rooted in shared Black and LGBTQ+ histories.

I came to know these practices from the margins of that space, as the fag who chose not to play outside with the “boys.” Instead, I lingered in the kitchen, at dining room tables, and in living rooms, where I learned that survival was inseparable from hyperfemme care, that resistance could sound like laughter. It sounds like the hours I spent with my grandmother getting ready in our best, before driving her to spend time with her best friend where they would parade together in her kitchen, Jamaican folk tracks in the background. TS Madison’s work reminds me that queerness has never called my Blackness into question, they were formed in the same home. 

Black femmes have long generated intellectual and cultural discourse through oral traditions, performance cultures, and visual aesthetics. At home or online, these practices privilege showing over telling, transmitting everyday Black vernacular rituals that reveal queerness and transness not as external to Blackness but as an expansion of its possibilities.

Catherine Knight Steele theorizes this dynamic in digital spaces through the concept of the “digital barbershop”, which honors the power of our oral cultures online, where Black people produce knowledge, negotiate identity, and cultivate community outside the constraints of dominant institutions. In Madison’s live videos with her mom, Ms. Mary, I see a gathering of these quiet rituals of Black femme transmission. Recognizing this unsettles the rigid femmephobia that continues to structure many of our communities, including LGBTQ+ spaces that prioritize gay men. Queerness is not simply a matter of sexuality or identity but a practice of relating — one that Black women have long modeled.

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These were Black women who received little support from men yet built homes and kinship structures that exceeded the binary logics meant to contain them.

This is part of the feminine-to-femme transmission. The women who raised me — who were also cast by dominant systems as disobedient, deviant, or failures of normative womanhood/society. Yet those same women taught me, a femme sissy, how to imagine otherwise. What was condemned as deviance became what I know as an early education in queer and Black possibility.

Nevertheless, the discourse around Black femme matter that gets these nuanced stories at the same table can sometimes fall short. Claudia Jordan suggests that Black women and Black queer people are shaped by overlapping structures of domination, but the failure to recognize this shared terrain of struggle produces an “us versus them” logic that mainstream media further animates for monetization. 

From engaging with everyday Black femme matter—including raw stories in literature, art, and media-making about gender, queer identity, and Black life—I have come to understand trans existence as a way of learning Black history: a living legacy of refusing binary and oppressive logics of conformity that are dominant in America, and creating alternative ways of being. Our culture needs more ways of knowing and seeing Black solidarity in these ordinary moments, beyond rigid binaries, because they carry lessons in joy as resistance & refusal, pleasure as politics, and the radical possibilities of living otherwise.

Full podcast episode with Sexy Lexi and TS Madison:

 

Dr. Chaz A. Barracks, PhD (he/they), is an interdisciplinary scholar, experimental filmmaker, and educator whose work explores Black popular culture, Black feminist theories, oral history, and the politics of the mundane + Black joy. They are the creator of Everyday Black Matter film (2020) and both write and teach courses on Black digital cultures and feminist knowledge/s, oral history, and media/communication arts. Follow him on Instagram at @everydayblackmatter.  Learn more at everydayblackmatter.com. 

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