Representing Perpetrators

I was in my old station wagon, driving home from teaching my transgender literature course, when I first heard about Danielle Allen's biography Cuz: Or the Life and Times of Michael A. At first, I was only half listening to the author's interview on public radio, focused instead on the events of the day's class. My students and I had been working through Janet Mock's 2014 memoir Redefining Realness, and I'd offered a reading in which Mock's portrayal of her partner Aaron, saturated with the sweetness of heterosexual desire, was an attempt to reach a mainstream audience. Perhaps, I'd said, these romantic scenes are a tactic to connect with the type of white cis women who might be reading Mock's story at a suburban feminist book club. But my students didn't see strategic essentialism at all; they saw outright resistance. It's radical, they argued, to portray a trans woman of color in love. Usually, they told me, they'd only read about trans women of color when they were dead.The representational problem that my students astutely raised—that even within trans studies, portrayals of Black trans women as victims of violence construct narrative frames that are so strong that it's shocking to read about a Black trans woman on a date—is what compels me to write now about a different representational problem, the one raised by Allen's Cuz. Indeed, the detail that knocked me out of my pedagogical replay and made me instead pay attention to Allen's Fresh Air interview was the mention of a trans woman, whom Allen calls “Bree.” Michael, Allen's late cousin and the subject of her intricate and compassionate biography, had met Bree in prison. They had fallen in love. Later, after they had both returned to the outside, Bree had killed Michael. It was this act of murder that spurned Allen, a Harvard professor specializing in political philosophy, to try to account for her cousin's life.While listening to this interview, as powerful and moving as I found Allen's retelling of Michael's story, I also braced myself to encounter transmisogyny. I caught myself expecting the interviewer to ask Allen for more intimate details about Bree's transition, or for Allen herself to offer an explanation for Bree's acts that reflected standard transphobic tropes: of criminal deception or inherent mental instability, hypersexualization or castration. I wondered if the conversation would turn to some hypothetical threat to Michael's masculinity that a relationship with a trans woman might have represented. None of this happened.If it was revelatory for my students to read a Black trans woman in love, it was striking for me to listen to this story of a Black trans woman as the perpetrator, rather than the victim, of deadly violence and hear no attempts to frame her acts as results of her transness. Indeed, I suspect that, if Allen had not had to reveal Bree's trans status in order for the audience to understand that her cousin met his girlfriend within the purportedly single-sex institution of the prison, she would not have done so.An ungenerous reading of the author's decision to treat Bree's gender identity so lightly is that Allen wants to defend her cousin's heterosexuality, even in death, against the type of people who believe that trans women are men. But—having finally gotten out of my station wagon and, a few weeks later, read the actual book—I think there's something else at work. Allen's text throughout is careful, thoughtful, and open-minded about gender and sexuality. It does not assume a defensive posture around Michael and his love. Instead, I see Allen grappling with a complex set of simultaneous representational constraints. As a nonfiction writer, Allen can't exactly alter the events that transpired. It is true that Bree and Michael were in love, and it is also true that Bree killed Michael. Furthermore, she wants her audience, people that include white, suburban, Volvo-driving NPR listeners, to be moved by the tragic story of her cherished cousin, a Black man from South Central Los Angeles who went to prison for an attempted carjacking at fifteen years old. She must both mourn this stolen life and explain the legislative history of the racist drug wars of the 1990s. And—and this is critical, something that matters for the wide public reception of a book published in 2017 in a way it may not have in, say, 1997—she must tell the story of the Black trans woman who killed her cousin without reproducing transmisogynoir.1For the most part, Cuz walked this tightrope with grace. There are a few aspects of Allen's description of Bree, despite her clear care to engage respectfully, that I might flag on a student paper—there's no real need to provide a birth name for Bree, for example, even a pseudonymous one. But Bree is not an evil deceiver or make-believer, as Talia Mae Bettcher has deemed the tropes of the bad trans woman character (Bettcher 2007). Her gender identity is not a metaphor for deception or mental illness; it does not foreshadow Michael's death. Bree's womanhood is womanhood, and her role in a violent relationship with Michael is the role of a troubled girlfriend, not a “trap.” As far as cis writers describing trans people go, Allen makes a critically important choice: Bree's gender identity is distinct from her decision making.And yet, the overarching argument of Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A is that no one's identity can be distinct from their decision making. As Allen's memoir-biography elegantly shows, the conditions of hypercriminalization, the war on drugs, California's three-strikes rule, and racist policing have constrained Michael's choices since he was born.Especially in part 3 of her book, Allen spends time peeling away each onion-like layer of social rot that ensnared Michael: the infiltration of Mafia-run heroin rings in 1940s Harlem, the white-supremacist destruction of Black communities in Omaha and Tulsa, the “Zoot Suit Riots” against Latinos in 1943 Los Angeles, and even the romanticization of gang life in the 1961 musical West Side Story. Readers have a rich tableau of reasons that Michael Allen, a happy child who loved climbing trees and beamed at the camera after his kindergarten graduation ceremony, died at age twenty-nine. But the great love of Michael's life, the love that spurred Michael, in his correspondence college courses that he completed while incarcerated, to write that “desire . . . makes men do things that they probably would not normally do” (124), is not granted such a sociologically rich backstory.Like Michael, Bree too would have been subject to the hyperpolicing of Black people in Los Angeles during the 1990s and 2000s. Had she been visibly gender nonconforming, she might have been suspected of performing illegal sex work, or in fact doing survival sex work, all of which would have increased her encounters with criminal punishment systems. She may have had to rely on informal networks of trans women for economic security, clothing, and medical care. Statistically, she is even more likely to have experienced sexual trauma than Michael or her other male companions within the prison system. Readers do not receive this information directly from Allen. Instead, we get transcriptions of court proceedings that say that Bree “allegedly shot at a man who was at a bus stop with her. The man was laughing and mocking her because he believed she was a man” (54). The state prosecutor introduced this information, even though Bree was never charged for that particular act, to establish a “pattern of acts of violence perpetrated by Bree” (54). Yet it is in this highly mediated moment that readers get a sense of what Bree's everyday experience of life might have been: a minefield of threats ranging from mockery to assault. Bree had been incarcerated in the first place for “assault with a firearm and for threatening injury with the potential to result in death” (55). A trans reader, especially one familiar with the cases of CeCe McDonald or Ky Peterson, might read these narratives of Bree's actions and suspect self-defense. But we have no hint, not even authorial speculation, of motive. What we have instead are cold administrative sentences.It makes sense that Allen would be reluctant to dive into the wreck of empathizing with her cherished cousin's killer. And I also do not believe that marginalized people are somehow exempt from doing harm to others. We simply do not know if Bree believed herself to be acting in self-defense. But within a book that is so determined to make readers grapple with the complex contingencies of Michael's actions, it is hard to miss the context vacuum that surrounds Bree. Sometimes, the delicacy with which Allen handles Bree's portrayal seems to give way to hesitation, as if the social world of a trans woman of color is too alien to be encountered. In Cuz, readers lose the chance to understand that transmisogynoir, too, is a symptom of white America's ravenous desire to criminalize and incarcerate racial and gender difference.Perhaps such a contextualized accounting is too much to demand of a grieving family member. But it's not too much to demand of all of us, as readers and thinkers within trans studies. In our field, we are already beginning to transform our understanding of survival and violence into one that is always contextualized within structural systems: indeed, TSQ has republished CeCe McDonald's prison letters, making them available to a broader audience of teachers and students across multiple continents. But as the tides continue to shift in trans visibility, and nontrans writers like Allen begin to learn the rules to avoid standard transphobic cliches, we have to be more attuned as critics to not just what destructive content is present but what constructive context is absent. As my students pointed out in their reading of Mock, new portrayals of trans people, especially Black trans women, are entering the literary conversation. Some of these are revolutionary in their emotional complexity, while others may appear novel only because they do not rehearse tired scripts. But we can still demand better than mere tolerance. We need to start grappling with how we permit trans people to be written, especially when they are both those to whom structural violence is done, and those from which intimate violence can erupt

Aesthetics · Art · Essentialism · Lesbian · Literature · Mainstream · Memoir · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Sociology · White (mutation · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology

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