Abstract
In February of 2008, Latisha King, a biracial, black trans girl, was shot twice in the back of the head by her white supremacist classmate, Brandon McInerney, in their junior high school classroom. The mainstream story of this case centers on a narrative of a crush gone wrong: a gay boy, Larry (Latisha) King, had a crush on Brandon McInerney, who felt threatened by this crush and murdered his classmate. Race and gender are silenced in this story. Gayle Salamon’s book, The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia corrects this narrative. Race and gender operate perniciously, Salamon argues, to justify violence against the victim. Latisha’s gender non-conformity coupled with her blackness are used to read her as aggressive, excessive, and out of line.
Salamon uses critical phenomenology to unveil the way that gender, apart from sexuality, was read and enacted in the murder trial and in the halls of EO Green Junior High School prior to Latisha’s murder. Latisha’s gender was not explicitly named and she was misgendered throughout the entire trial. Despite the failures of naming, Latisha’s gender was ‘weaponized’ (p. 15) against her both through her gestures and bodily movement: through her feminine walk with heeled boots clacking or through the material objects she adored that came into the courtroom as evidence: heeled boots, a strapless green dress, and makeup. These gestures and objects were used in the murder trial to make arguments about the inappropriateness of Latisha’s being.
Additionally, a pretrial hearing determined that Latisha’s murder was not motivated by race, and therefore race was officially disallowed to enter the courtroom despite evidence that the defendant had been involved in a racist neo-nazi group. Yet racially coded descriptions of Latisha as ‘aggressive’ (p. 19) tangled together with her gender expression were used to argue that McInerney’s murderous actions were in self-defense. Salamon warns against reading this case singularly as homophobic. What is obscured by such a narrative is the way that ‘violence justifies itself by characterizing non-normative gender as itself a violent act of aggression and reading the expression of gender identity as itself a sexual act’ (p. 5) and the way that ‘race is literally unmentionable and is erased from the story in order to make the narrative about gayness more legible, a legibility that is in turn dependent on the simultaneous analogy with and erasure of trans identity’ (p. 40).
The book is organized around four concepts – Comportment (Chapter 1), Movement (Chapter 2), Anonymity (Chapter 3) and Objects (Chapter 4). The first two chapters focus on gesture and argue that when language fails to name Latisha’s gender, bodily movement and gesture fills in. By analyzing bodily movement in the courtroom, Salamon captures that which a transcript cannot. The lawyers mimic Latisha’s gestures, creating a narrative about bodily movement that is gendered, but not named as such. Salamon thus argues that gender is a ‘gestural phenomenon’ (p. 14) captured by bodily movement even when language fails to name it.
The second half of the book expands on the concept of the body to explore the social body of school and the material bodies of objects that are brought into the courtroom as evidence. Here, Salamon demonstrates how Latisha is blamed for her failures to become anonymous, to blend in to normative ways of being. Her self-expression and the objects she adorns are interpreted as defiance; they become leverage for her own culpability in her murder, obscuring the ways in which the context of school was a site of transphobia and gender policing that propelled hostility and violence towards Latisha. Gender was of great significant to Latisha’s murder – Latisha was murdered because of her gender expression and her gender expression was used to justify her murder – yet gender remains an elusive concept, attaching to gestures and objects, but never as constitutive of bodies or persons.
Even when concepts such as race and gender cannot be named, they are operative in the workings of power and violence. Critical race scholars have argued that inclusivity frameworks and anti-discrimination doctrines make racism unmentionable and create colorblindness, behind which racism continues to fester (Crenshaw, 1998; Freeman, 1978). A similar logic played out in the case of Latisha King – as the witness transcripts show, teachers insisted that they were protecting Latisha by encouraging her to conform to normative gender roles and expression. Her refusal to dampen her gender self-expression and blend into normative ways of being, coupled with her blackness, became fodder for an argument that her murder was justifiable. Protectionist logics do not help queer youth in school; they work perniciously to obscure power (Roberts and Marx, 2018). The semblances of protection Latisha’s teachers offered allowed them to portray her as defiant to their wishes. She was ‘drawing attention’ (p. 75), ‘making [herself] a target’ (p. 73) ‘dramatic’ (p. 54) and attention-seeking (p. 118). Therefore, the narrative became, Latisha ‘needed to be stopped’ (p. 157) in order to ensure the safety of the school. A school culture of homophobia, transphobia, racism and sexism was thus concealed.
The Life and Death of Latisha King is critical, yet emotional, reading for those interested in the pernicious workings of power and violence as they are entangled with gender, sexuality, and race.