Abstract
This essay returns to Evelynn Hammonds’s field-changing essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” with a focus on the labor of knowledge production under fraught institutional conditions, characterized in this essay as
. The simultaneous desire for and impossibility of accurate language to describe racialized, gendered, and sexual subjectivity drive Hammonds’s essay as well as a number of other key texts in Black feminist sexuality studies. This essay (re)introduces the diagnostic category of dysphoria to speak to this paradox: here,
describes the affective and psychic condition of institutional illegibility and fungibility for racialized and gendered people. Using the analytic of dysphoria to characterize and connect the political economy of Black feminist knowledge production and the life narrative of A. Dionne Stallworth, a Black trans woman activist, this essay directs urgent attention to the simultaneously material, spiritual, psychic, and affective dimensions of self-, knowledge-, and world-making.