Afrofuturism & the Transcending Powers of Being Anti-Binary
Content warning: Mention of Black Death, Slavery, Rape. I do not go into depth on these topics.
“We weren’t even from here anyway.” I remember hearing this from an internet video during the uprisings in 2020 and immediately thinking “woah this person just said exactly how I feel about my existence.”
The very basis of queer futures *see José Esteban Muñoz Cruising Utopia*, is reaching for an expressive world, unattainable, and always on the horizon, as Muñoz so articulately puts, that liberates all those affected by 1. the system of gendered power: the patriarchy, and 2. human grief for their lost self: colonization, white supremacy and sadism.
The present-day narrative of non-binary people feeling otherworldly, extraterrestrial, was first modeled by Indigenous communities, specifically African people.
Afrofuturism is a term founded by Mark Dery in 1994. Dery wrote Black to the Future, where the absence of African-American science fiction novelists is brought into question. “This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies” (Dery, 1994). The last line references the medical malpractice atrocities performed on Black bodies: the contemporary field of gynecology being founded on raping, experimenting on Black vulva-having slaves without consent, forced sterilization, branding, the Tuskegee experiment.
This alien feeling is not new, it has the potential of connecting us to Queer futures, therefore Indigenous pasts. Celestial ways of conceptualizing ourselves transcend heteronormative understandings of a neoliberal, capitalist society, giving us glimpses of hope, and maybe even of healing.
Dery, M. (1994). Flame wars : the discourse of cyberculture. Duke University Press.
I am writing to you from unceded land of the Lenni-Lenape peoples as a Bisayan Filipino-American non-binary person/woman.
