analytic theories like anti-Blackness cannot singularly explain the way anti-queer violence is levied. Nonidentity is not totalizing, but rather provides an analytic of the nature of trans/queer violence.

Gay Shame’s insistence on thinking both these iterations of racialized anti-trans/queer violence together is also the methodological commitment of this book. Araujo’s tragic murder might be primarily understood to be that of intersubjective violence, the phobic eruption of a personal relationship that became unbearable, and Akbar’s might function as a generic expression of the violence of the state form, once again levied against Blackness. Bringing them together, then, builds an analysis that is attentive to the scale of direct attack that is always staged within the language of the state that demands it. By tracing these edges, not only does an analysis of anti-trans/queer violence appear, but these connections allow for, or more pointedly order, a reading of normative power—modernity’s common sense—where Enlightenment’s dreams become our nightmares.9

This antagonism melds the spectacular murders of Jihad Alim Akbar and Gwen Araujo with the quotidian desires for destruction, including the sterilizing glares that rob one of the ability to sink into comfort. Besieged, the threat of harm reverberates in the fleshiness of the everyday, producing a kind of death-in-waiting lived as what Frantz Fanon called a “feeling of nonexistence.” Catastrophically, this imminent danger constitutes for the trans/queer that which is the sign of vitality itself, as possibility and limit are collapsed into one.

What, then, becomes of trans/queer life, if it’s produced through the negativity of forced death and at the threshold of obliteration? Pushed further, if trans/queer life is constituted in the social as empty of meaning beyond the anonymity of bone, what kind of violence is done to that which is never properly here?10

In another time and place, “Tiens, un nègre!”11 (“Look, a Negro!”12) opened Frantz Fanon’s chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Lived Experience of the Black” (L’expérience vécue du Noir), infamously mistranslated as “The Fact of Blackness.” Fanon enters here, as he does throughout this text, against a logic of flattened substitution and toward a political commitment to nonmimetic friction—the messiness of history and that history’s reemergence. After all, the racialized phenomenology of Blackness under colonization that Fanon illustrates may be productive to read against and with a continuum of anti-trans/queer racialized violence in the settler colony that is the United States. The visual’s capacity to capture through the dialectics of recognition and the scopic must figure with such a reading of race, gender, and sexuality. It is argued, and rightfully so, that the instability of trans/queerness obscures it from the epidermalization that anchors the idea of race in the fields of the visual. When thinking about the difference between anti-Semitism and racism, which for Fanon was a question of the visuality of oppression, he similarly suggests, “the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness.”13 However, here it may be useful to reread Fanon through an understanding of the visual that reminds us that Jewish people can sometimes not be unknown in their Jewishness (including Jews of color), evidenced by the endurance of anti-Semitism. Or, this is to suggest that domination always exists within and also in excess of the representational, which includes the sensorium of its arrival—the extra-diegesis of difference.14

Similarly, I ask why anti-trans/queer violence, more often than not, is correctly levied against us. In other words, the discursive aim of liberalism that subsists under the sign of equality argues that trans/queerness is indistinguishable under the social order. This misses, or more precisely disappears, in the name of its own coherence—differences it cannot endure, while also harnessing difference as its organizing principle. Against such claims, I suggest that there are moments of figuration where trans/queerness does in fact signify differently, not because of an innate ontological structure but because of the ways ontology is naturalized through one’s place in the world. I’m not suggesting that there is an always locatable trans/queerness that exists outside historicity, but such a fiercely flexible semiotics might conditionally offer a way of knowing this violence that can withstand the weight of generality.15

Indeed, not all who might identify as either trans and/or queer experience the same relationship to violence. Such differentiation is the underside of this book as the consolidation of LGBT politics operates, perhaps most vividly, through an endless drive toward recognition before the law. As I glossed in the introduction, this demand for inclusion through the architecture of formal equality solidifies the attachment to the state as the primary, if not exclusive, method of transformation. Beyond thinking that equality is a less effective tactic in the struggle for freedom, here I understand equality as that which ensures that anything other remains unthinkable. While at times strategically necessary, organizing movements under its banner solidifies the idea that the same system that has been built and maintained through deadly inclusive exclusion is also where relief can be found.16

The betrayal that is LGBT equality takes form in the grim fact that the overwhelming proportion of trans/queer people who are murdered in the United States are of color; specifically, Black trans women endure the most vicious forms of quotidian and spectacular attack.17 Similarly, Black, Brown, and/or Indigenous trans/queer people who are surviving in spaces of hyper-control, from jails and psych prisons to public housing and ICE detention centers, along with those whose labor is criminalized, including sex workers and drug dealers, experience the intensification of this structuring violence as the predisposition to interpersonal attack. In contrast, many LGBT people in the United States who otherwise exist within white cis normativity may in their daily lives know very little about either systematic or personal harm. The long history and magnified present of LGBT assimilation illustrates these varying degrees of life chances available to some, that under the democratic order come at the expense of others. In contrast, I am marking trans/queer as the horizon where identity crumbles and vitality is worked otherwise. Here, trans/queer might be a productive placeholder to name a nonidentity where force is made to live. This is not to suggest that the negativity of trans/queerness and methodologies of annihilation define the end of our sociality or that the parameters of opposition are sedimented as such. As is cataloged throughout this text, our legacies of wild revolt—fashioning a world without vertical genealogies—insists that trans/queerness remains as generativity’s future present.18