This session aims to activate the various theoretical resonances of blackness and trans materialisms —from Trans Marixsms and gendered racial capitalism; the Human, tranimalities, & trans ecologies; and trans architecture and the built environment; and the eclectic relationships between them.

This session draws inspiration from the work of M Jacqui Alexander, Dora Silva Santana, and other scholars and activists situated in afrotransfeminismos to understand the ways that Black transness travels between, within, and outside the logics of capital, empire, borders, racialization, and ability to shape, not only those who embody shared trans and/or travesti identities in the African Diaspora, but how the “shifting I” – of embodiment and identity - reflect and shape deeper relationships of engagement.

This session asks a simple question: How does Black transness alter the ways we understand Black desirability and sexual practice? While modern sexuality is a confluence of political, economic, affective, and racialized relationships that has been codified in and through antiblack violence, this session centers how the black erotic opens up "escape hatches" (Ultra Omni 2023) for black trans power, futurity, social reproduction, and living otherwise.

This session opens up new lines of flight in archives, methodologies, theories, and speculative imaginaries rooted in black trans feminism, and it aims to both build on the scholarly articulations of black trans feminism as an intellectual-political project (Green & Bey 2017; Gossett and Huxtable 2017; Bey 2022; Smythe 2022; Buchanan & Ikuku 2021) and the brilliant art, writings, community organizing, and freedom dreaming of black trans activists, transcestors, and elders (Snorton 2017; Ellison 2017; Ultra Omni 2023; Tourmaline 2025).