Tristen Kade Graduate Student, UCSB Sociology

Theorizing Black Trans Masculinities

In this presentation, I will be workshopping the theoretical frameworks, methodology, and primary research questions that guide my dissertation research project. This project empirically investigates (1) how Black trans men navigate and accomplish masculinity in private and public romantic and sexual interactions, (2) how race, gender, and sexuality interact to shape these accomplishments, (3) how Black trans men’s understandings and embodiments of masculinity resist, transform, and reproduce dominant ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality. In order to address these questions, I first situate an interdisciplinary theorical framework that places the subfields of masculinities, gender and sexualities, and Black trans studies together, in conversation with each other. To empirically address these questions, I discuss the various methods (e.g., ethnographic interviews) that I plan to conduct with Black trans masculine people, an unaccounted-for population within scholarship. In essence, this will be a work in-progress presentation of what I hope will be my dissertation research project.