About Gods, I Don\u27t Believe in None of That Shit, the Facts Are Backwards: Slaughterhouse\u27s Lyrical Atheism

Hip Hop group Slaughterhouse\u27s multi-membered, perversely holy quadrinity provides a fertile site for a pseudo-non-theological theological reading-a theology with and without god, that is, with god\u27s titular presence but bereft of any ethos of a mover and shaker god. God, in my reading of Slaughterhouse\u27s lyrics, is impotent. Rather than the Word, Slaughterhouse publishes sacred texts (albums and mixtapes) that speak to Black embodied life; their albums are the scriptural holy ghetto-Word, the Gospels that of Royce, Crooked, Joell, and Joey, rather than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Through the lyrics of Slaughterhouse\u27s songs, they craft a god that is but is not; a god that does lyrical work in the sense that the name of god has cultural capital and produces effects, but is not God, that is, a being that commands the heavens and the Earth

She Had a Name That God Didn’t Give Her: Thinking the Body through Atheistic Black Radical Feminism

The article attempts to demonstrate the necessity of acknowledging the body when considering the current Black Lives Matter movement, give an account of Black female and trans erasure, and ultimately (re)affirm the lived embodiment of Black, female, and trans bodies, all through an atheistic lens. Atheism here, while indeed denying the existence of gods, has as its primary concern affirming life. Too often is theology, as theologian Anthony Pinn says, “a theology of no-body”; thus atheistic feminist Blackness, as understood here, seeks to entrench the body rather than abstract it. Atheistic feminist Blackness reinscribes and affirms the subjectivity and humanity of Black, female, and trans bodies, countering hegemonic discourse that explicitly and implicitly states otherwise. The article’s emphasis of an atheistic posture stems from the prescient words of Catherine Keller: “atheist or agnostic feminists ignore the God-word at their own peril.” Therefore, the Black feminist ideological argument takes the “God-word” seriously, reckons with it, and offers an alternative to a theological tradition that often imbues the body with inherent flaw (sin), abstraction (soul), and erasure of the ontological value of Black, female, and noncisgendered bodies

Genomic Relationships, Novel Loci, and Pleiotropic Mechanisms across Eight Psychiatric Disorders

Genetic influences on psychiatric disorders transcend diagnostic boundaries, suggesting substantial pleiotropy of contributing loci. However, the nature and mechanisms of these pleiotropic effects remain unclear. We performed analyses of 232,964 cases and 494,162 controls from genome-wide studies of anorexia nervosa, attention-deficit/hyper-activity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and Tourette syndrome. Genetic correlation analyses revealed a meaningful structure within the eight disorders, identifying three groups of inter-related disorders. Meta-analysis across these eight disorders detected 109 loci associated with at least two psychiatric disorders, including 23 loci with pleiotropic effects on four or more disorders and 11 loci with antagonistic effects on multiple disorders. The pleiotropic loci are located within genes that show heightened expression in the brain throughout the lifespan, beginning prenatally in the second trimester, and play prominent roles in neurodevelopmental processes. These findings have important implications for psychiatric nosology, drug development, and risk prediction.Peer reviewe

The Blacknesses of Blackness: Fugitivity, Feminism, and Transness

“The Blacknesses of Blackness: Fugitivity, Feminism, and Transness,” recalibrates blackness, black feminism, and transness less as bodily endowments or “identities” and more as various inflections of subjectivities in excess of categorization, normativity, and imposed ontologies. It establishes a gendered account of black fugitivity, the purpose of which is not to argue that thinkers of blackness as proximate to fugitivity always fail to think race and gender simultaneously; rather, it is to argue that black fugitivity conceived through a trans/feminist theoretical lens makes clearer the ways in which blackness-as-fugitivity interacts with radical understandings of gender. To facilitate this, the dissertation read treatises of antebellum slaves and theorizations of blackness and gender to excavate how they converge with contemporary feminist and trans texts; the prose poetry of Alexis Pauline Gumbs in the context of women of color feminists and diaspora theorists; the cultural phenomenon of Rachel Dolezal and the “racial reassignment surgery” discourse of Jess Row’s novel Your Face in Mine (2014) alongside black trans theories of the analytics of blackness and gender; and black feminist critical engagements with Afro-pessimism. What if, the dissertation queries, we think about blackness and black feminism not as the province of people with particular bodies but as ways of locating subjectivity elsewhere than how we have been scripted to be able to exist legibly? What if we bring the “trans”—movement in excess of an unchosen starting point to an undisclosed destination—to bear on blackness

The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender

A complex articulation of the ways blackness and nonnormative gender intersect—and a deeper understanding of how subjectivities are formed. A deep meditation on and expansion of the figure of the Negro and insurrectionary effects of the “X” as theorized by Nahum Chandler, The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender thinks through the problematizing effects of blackness as, too, a problematizing of gender. Through the paraontological, the between, and the figure of the “X” (with its explicit contemporary link to nonbinary and trans genders) Marquis Bey presents a meditation on black feminism and gender nonnormativity. Chandler’s text serves as both an argumentative tool for rendering the “radical alternative” in and as blackness as well as demonstrating the necessarily trans/gendered valences of that radical alternative. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship

Trans visibility and trans viability: a Roundtabl

This Roundtable is crafted from the online event held on Saturday 20 November 2021 on Trans Visual Cultures. That event was organized to celebrate the recently published themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture on new work in transgender art and visual cultures, guest edited by Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg, and suggested for the journal by Jill H Casid. The themed issue emerged from a session run at the College Art Association in New York, 2018, programmed by Metzger and Ringelberg. For the event in November 2021, some of the contributors to the journal\u27s themed issue (Kara Carmack, Sascha Crasnow, Stamatina Gregory, Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg) were joined by interlocutor Jill Casid, and respondent Jack Halberstam to share their thoughts on trans visual culture/s now, and to consider what it is to write trans visual culture, as well as to live in relation to transness. The event happened to fall on Transgender Day of Remembrance. Given the fraught or ambivalent feelings that many have about such a day, the event was also taken as an occasion to talk about ways of untethering trans visibility from what is lethal to trans viability. After the event, the organizers solicited a few additional reflections on concerns that emerged - in particular around matters of the visual, trans visibility, and lived experience. These are brought together to act as a refractive prism for what happens when we center thinking seriously with the implications and potentials of trans art and visual culture for trans hopes and fears, kinship and community, lives and loves. The publication of this Roundtable takes the themed issue as a crucial springboard for critical, transversal trans* imaginings of the variant worlds to be unfolded by undoing the lock of the gender binary and its settler colonial and white supremacist violences, and to further the demand that thinking with trans alters substantially the ways we approach the visual