Fleeing the Scene of Sex and Race: Transformation, Fugitivity, and New Styles of Human Being

What does it mean to be human untethered to modalities of sex and race? What other styles of human being may have already emerged by posing that very question? This chapter moves away from analytics of inclusion, and travels through queer and black engagements with critical negativity to find a theoretical engagement with sexual politics that does not affirm human being, but ruptures this figure toward an elsewhere to come. Critical negativity following Eve Sedgwick’s focus on negative feelings toward Jose Munoz’s queer horizon holds a promise for more liveable lifeworlds. Yet, this chapter argues such imaginings of transformation are haunted by humanist assumptions that end up constraining its horizon. Critical negativity emerging from black studies also carries such promise of liveability but consists of a move from the negative (ontological negation) to the fugitive. In particular, this chapter provides a collage of three concepts – Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Plasticity, Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-fabulation, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons – to provide a door to a different world, where human being might not pivot on the violence of racialization and sexualization. Reading these critical negativities together invites us to think of transformation and fugitivity in the same political and theoretical frame without collapsing one into the other. It challenges psychosocial studies to seek the humanist assumptions roiling underneath its ambivalent relation to discipline and invites psychosocial studies to look for the other worlds that can be found in the shadows of its transdisciplinary intelligibility