Fugitive Spaces: Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies

Developed by Martino Mangano, GWSL Student Employee
University of Wisconsin
January 2024

This bibliography is number 105c in the series “Bibliographies in Gender and Women’s Studies,” published by the University of Wisconsin System Office of the Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian. It was developed as part of “Honoring Our Past, Securing Our Future: Resilience and Reclamation in Higher Education – A set of bibliographies supporting the 2024 Conference of the UW System Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium.”

Introduction

In Excitable Speech (1997), Judith Butler describes how theory works in both “implicit and fugitive ways” (40). This terminology—“fugitive”—has influenced other theorists to explore the idea that political discourses move across boundaries, histories, and disciplines. It is this transmutability that marks the contested relationship between feminist, queer, and trans studies. These fields have been built upon one another, expanding, contracting, and at times—fighting to ensure intellectual, political, and activist space for all possibilities. Or in the words of bell hooks (2000), to ensure that “feminism,” indeed, “is for everybody.” This thread welcomes a look back at the ways in which queer and trans studies have strengthened feminist thought, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as related fields – such as history, sociology, art history, and many others. Projects reflecting on the history of queer and trans studies, as well as ones that look toward the future are encouraged.

In order for one to understand fugitive feminism, one must familiarize themselves with the concept of fugitivity. Studies in fugitivity originate in Black Studies scholarship and in its investigation of slavery, as well as its effects on understandings of Blackness. Fugitive slave laws created in the 18th and 19th centuries punished enslaved people who escaped their captive environments and those who aided them in their escape. Black Studies scholars have argued that the idea of one who flees systemic control and crosses borders is fundamentally part of the conceptualization of Blackness. Fugitive feminism leans on this conceptualization of the fugitive to explore possibilities of abolition from hierarchies, binaries, and oppression.

If you are new to fugitive studies, I would recommend starting with Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism and Them Goon Rules, which explore the utilization of fugitivity in abolition for Black/trans/queer/all people. I also find Nick J. Sciullo’s “Boston King’s Fugitive Passing: Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Tina Campt’s Rhetoric of Resistance” to be helpful in providing an introductory explanation of the concept of fugitivity.