Overview

A memoir and mythography of a Black trans man's journey from Baby Girl to Black Boi, through gender, race, and trans theory made personal In a country built on the daily oppression and incarceration of Black people, on the rejection of queer and trans rights, how does a Black trans man become himself or find home? ""Home is commonly understood as a place of bodily safety, a place where one can find themselves a resting place, but for me and for many Black queer folk, our bodies most often preclude any home-making with those kinds of securities."" It is this reality that spurred Kai Marshall Green's investigation into bodies--and the love between them--discounted by the mainstream as deviant, deficient, and defective. In his powerful debut memoir, Green recounts his lifelong transition from ""Baby Girl"" to ""Black Boi,"" his current and future self. Laced through his accounts of traversing discrimination, misunderstanding, and abuse from family, society, and academia are experiments in letter writing and biomythography, continuing in the literary tradition of Audre Lorde. Through A Body Made Home, Green explores the long, stuttering arc of transition as a Black queer person in America, recasting visions of home, narratives of metamorphosis, and dreams of freedom.

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9781558613225

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Reviews

""Sometimes we have to create the language for the stories we need to tell. In this book, Marshall Green has done exactly that. This book is a victory not only in bravery and honesty, but in craft and form. A Body Made Home is a book that will help everyone who reads it to become more free. Let one of those people be you."" --Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals""Kai Green has been one of the most dynamic writers alive for a while. This memoir cements them as something wholly different. I have stretched and laughed and wept over this book. There is no memoir alive as fleshy and radically theoretical as this offering. Green takes Barbara Christian's thought to a place that I've never imagined. This place, where the body is as worn and flexible as the theory we used to explore it, is so so black, and this black is so necessarily trans. We wouldn't know or feel any of this if the prose weren't so in the pocket. Kai has made a book feel like flesh."" --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy ""As intimate an experience as holding Kai's hand and looking into his eyes, this book shares memories, passions, episodic emptiness--all in the creation of the self. As a Black girl in Oakland who became a trans masc university professor in New England, Kai travels worlds interior and bordered. All is grounded in love for their mother, both as a vulnerable lover, caretaker, and as an archetype Black Mama. A luscious journey to integration and recognition.""--Sarah Schulman, author of The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity ""A Body Made Home is Kai Marshall Green's spell of becoming, a text that turns silence into song and wounds into portals. Here, Black trans love and queer kinship blaze against erasure. Enter this work and find a sanctuary where language remakes the world and the body learns to fly."" --E. Patrick Johnson, author of Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women ""In A Body Made Home, Kai Marshall Green offers readers an utterly compelling, utterly courageous memoir of 'be&comin'' trans, especially at a time when trans bodies, black trans bodies, are criminalized and legislated against. Descended from Audre Lorde's literary notion of 'biomythography, ' A Body Made Home treats the stories of Green's body as always evolving, ever in a constant state of transition, and thus unstable as black, as gendered, as classed, as trans. This is a powerful, timely work of resistance and self-determination. I felt like I was reading the future. And I could not put it down."" --Alexis De Veaux, author of JesusDevil: The Parables

Author Information

Kai Marshall Green is a writer, organizer, and educator. Green received his PhD from the University of Southern California and is assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Delaware. An interdisciplinary scholar, he employs Black feminist theory, performance studies, and trans studies to investigate forms of self-representation and communal methods of political mobilization by Black queer folk. A founding member of Black Youth Project 100, Green has published and edited work in GLQ: Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Black Camera, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. A Body Made Home is his first book.

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