Figment made flesh: minstrelsy and nonbinary embodiment in Of Montreal's Georgie Fruit saga

Abstract

Between 2007 and 2011, Kevin Barnes, the white founding member and vocalist of indie group Of Montreal, performed as a Black trans alter-ego named Georgie Fruit. In 2020, Barnes came out as nonbinary and apologised for Fruit but acknowledged that playing Fruit helped them actualise their own gender. This article takes seriously the relationship between white nonbinary self-actualisation and an imagination of Black transness, questioning what yoking Fruit to the development of Barnes’ own white nonbinariness does, even and especially as they disavow the significance of Fruit's Blackness. I analyse the records Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? and Skeletal Lamping and their respective paratexts (press releases, interviews, documentaries, etc.) through trans negativity, a theoretical framework that considers how liberal trans identity is bound to anti-Blackness. Tracing the affective and psychic processes through which Fruit furnishes Barnes’ sense of self, this article interrogates the particularities of fungibility. As a character performed on stage, Fruit is interpreted as a form of contemporary minstrelsy that serves as a defensive mechanism to distance Barnes from their desires enough for sexual and gendered exploration. Through juxtaposition to minstrelsy, the affect of animatedness is revealed to subtend Barnes’ actualisation as nonbinary, establishing a veneer of freedom that mobilises Fruit as a pliable body. Encountering Barnes as a means through which to elaborate the anti-Blackness that can furnish the psychic structure of white nonbinary embodiment, this article concludes by questioning the resonances between the plasticisation accorded to Blackness and the imagined plasticity of nonbinariness. Can the plasticity of Barnes’ nonbinariness be extricated from that of Blackness? Finding a relationship between animatedness, the plasticisation of Blackness and white nonbinariness, I suggest that trans studies take more seriously the anti-Blackness of gender consolidation.

Gender, if at all appropriate in this scenario, must be understood as indissociable from violence, the vicious refiguration of rape as mutual and shared desire, the wanton exploitation of the captive body tacitly sanctioned as a legitimate use of property, the disavowal of injury, and the absolute possession of the body and its ‘issue’.

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 1997

Through a four-album saga between 2007 and 2011, Kevin Barnes, the founding member and vocalist of indie group Of Montreal, wrote, recorded and performed as their alter-ego, Georgie Fruit – a trans, pansexual, Black vocalist of a fictional 1970s funk band Arousal. As Barnes – a white person hailing from Georgia who at the time identified as straight and cis – embraced this ‘dark mutation’, the band drifted from indie rock and experimented more substantially with funk and soul (Of Montreal, 2007b). For a band that frequently mixed genres, deploying signifiers of Blackness in lyrics, rhythm and on stage could have been surreptitiously explained as mere exploration. Yet Barnes refuses such a generous reading, crooning ‘I’m just a Black she-male’ on ‘Wicked Wisdom’ (Of Montreal, 2008), employing African-American Vernacular English and announcing in interviews that Fruit was ‘in his late forties, a black man who has been through multiple sex changes. He's been a man and a woman, and then back to a man. He's been to prison a couple of times’ (Carriere, 2007).

Though the press casually questioned Barnes about Fruit, this metamorphosis was predominantly considered benign but fascinating. Rather than a cause for pause, Fruit amplified the band's success: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, ¹ the album upon which Fruit first emerged, was lauded by Pitchfork, receiving a then-coveted ‘Best New Music’ score, and it is still considered Of Montreal's magnum opus (Mitchum, 2007). In 2008, Fruit returned in his most chaotic form on Skeletal Lamping but was disavowed by Barnes post release. Emphasising that Fruit had released his ‘weird possession of a part of [Barnes’] brain’, Barnes stressed the integration of ego and alter through the rhetoric of property and capture (Grandy, 2008). By Paralytic Stalks (2021b), Barnes considered Fruit to be totally creatively extraneous. Nevertheless, his impact on their career continued to be felt. Catapulted to indie fame, Barnes became friends and collaborators with the likes of Janelle Monae and Solange Knowles (Wasabi Fashion Kult, 2011). Since 2011, the band has released seven other Fruitless albums and countless EPs.

In light of Fruit's absence, it was a surprise in November 2019 when Barnes tweeted about their regret regarding Fruit, without any pretext. Explaining that they realised Fruit was an ‘insensitive’ ‘writing device’ meant to ‘transcend … pain’, Barnes clarified Fruit's utility for their own psychic development whilst reassuring fans that they had never even considered ‘performing black faced or transbodied’ (Barnes, 2019). Endeavouring to lay the matter to rest, Barnes did not retire Fruit but killed him, tweeting ‘GF is dead+♥ing it’ (i.e. dead and loving it) (Barnes, 2019). But while Fruit was dead, he was certainly not forgotten. In summer 2020, Barnes came out as nonbinary, describing how the stage provided them a space to ‘BE one of my true selves’, through ‘personas’, one of which ‘was … um … very problematic … but I won’t get into that here…’ (Barnes, 2020a). Only that September did Barnes return to the topic, penning a post titled ‘GEORGIE FRUIT REVISITED’. Building on their previous sentiments, Barnes apologised for Fruit and suggested that ‘inhabiting’ Fruit, this Black ‘trans persona’, was what yielded the discovery of their nonbinariness (Barnes, 2020b; Nordheim, 2022).

Of course, Barnes is far from the first musician to inhabit Blackness for self-actualisation (see Miley Cyrus, Pink, Qveen Herby, etc). ² Inhabiting Blackness is, as Dionne Brand maintains, ‘a domestic, hemispheric pastime, a transatlantic pastime, an international pastime. There is a playing around in it’ that renders Blackness overdetermined by captivity, as fungible, ‘in all its subsequent and contemporary appearances’ (2002: 38). Still, distinct to Barnes is the explicit articulation of Fruit as the psychic scaffolding of a specifically nonbinary identity, yoking the performance of Black transness to white nonbinary identification. Particular to Barnes is a stated avowal of the ways in which this ‘figment made flesh’ ³ was essential to their gender fluidity, even if Barnes disavowed the relevance of Fruit's Blackness to this pursuit (Denney, 2008; Nordheim, 2022). And it is this expression and claiming of this extraction that is noteworthy in its extremity, dramatising the psychic manoeuvres of more quotidian examples wherein anti-Blackness can be generative for gendered play. ⁴

Therefore, this article takes seriously the relationship between white nonbinary self-actualisation and this imagined Black ‘trans persona’, questioning what linking Fruit to the development of Barnes’ own white nonbinariness does, even and especially as they reject the significance of Fruit's Blackness. Turning to Hissing Fauna and Skeletal Lamping, the two albums where Fruit is most pronounced, I theorise Barnes’ performance of Fruit as minstrelsy. Blackfaceless, but nonetheless performing the excesses of Blackness, Barnes plays Fruit as a hypersexual Black stereotype. Through these theatrics, I argue that Fruit foments and facilitates Barnes’ sexual and gendered exploration, providing a world-class education in taboo. Illuminating how Barnes readily identifies that they are Fruit's (puppet) master, that Fruit's captive embodiment is for their enjoyment, I posit that Fruit's multiple ‘sex changes’ are less evident of any sort of ‘trans persona’, and more a demonstration of animatedness: the affective rebar of minstrelsy. Rather than signifying a gendered will, as the pursual of gender-affirming care typically would, these ‘sex changes’ are a veneer for the enforced pliability of the Black body requisite for Barnes to imagine their own gendered plasticity. Interrogating the supposed likeness between Barnes’ transness and Fruit's putative transness, I demonstrate how Barnes deployed Fruit as a will-less substrate whose ‘sex changes’ corporeally visibilised Barnes's potential gendered malleability, as the external sexed substantiation of Barnes's gendered internality. I contend that this psychopolitical affair puts into relief the resonances between an imagined plasticity accorded to and enforced upon/as Blackness via racial slavery (Jackson, 2020), and the imagined plasticity sought in conceptualisations of nonbinariness that fetishise infinity, potentiality and flexibility (Stekl and Evang, 2022).

Through this analysis, I seek neither to pathologise nor simply to lambast Barnes to cleanse trans studies and/or trans people of anti-Blackness. Nor do I perceive Barnes to be an exceptionally ‘bad feminist object whose repudiation can help restore faith in feminism's capacity to transform the world’ (Wiegman, 2023: 473). Given the libidinal economy of both the academy and (white) feminism, a concern that this query is primarily interested in expurgating transness is understandable. An interrogation of Barnes could easily shore up the righteousness of trans politics by pointing out that some trans people are anti-Black in the desire to push us all to do better. However, as anyone who has read the most meagre portions of critical race theory or sat through the confessions that occur during any ‘Anti-Racism 101’ training surely knows, merely bemoaning whiteness or ‘unpacking privilege’ does not trouble the psychopolitical structure of race. Witnessing colleagues discuss their childhood experiences of their first friend of colour can just as easily yield to moments of disavowal: at least I didn’t believe that. It would be easy for readers to confuse my task here with this same act: at least I am not Barnes. But I would wager that Barnes may have been bold and brash, loud and wrong, but their fantasy of this imago is not theirs alone. Many of us may be more implicated than we would like in the same processes that Barnes lays bare (Wiegman, 2023: 456).

To ‘risk’ this implication (Wiegman, 2023), this article approaches Barnes through Eva Hayward's (2017) framework of trans negativity, which queries how trans representation and identification is bound up with slave making. Trans negativity ‘deal[s] with’ the question of how white (trans) coherence ‘requires parasitism in order to survive’ (King and Wilderson, 2020: 52–76). Barnes proves fruitful for this trans negative analysis in as much as they ‘expose how’ liberal trans desires for plasticity, flexibility and affectivity ‘are predicated on racialized humanism’ (Hayward, 2017: 193). Trans negativity puts into relief this refraction between and within these (in)distinct forms of plasticity, orientating one to wade through Barnes's racism due to its productivity, not, or perhaps in, its iniquity, intimating the ways in which the plasticisation of Blackness may be complementary to (nonbinary) gender beyond Barnes. ⁵

That said, trans negativity facilitates a purposeful reading of Barnes and Fruit that is by no means comprehensive of either Barnes’ biography or the scaffolding of anti-Blackness. A totalising account of either would both be impossible and impenetrable. Beyond how Barnes was often contradictory and senseless in interviews, lyrics and on stage, no object could express the totality of anti-Blackness, the wholeness of the world (as much as one would desire for that to be so). Therefore, ‘figment made flesh’ approaches Fruit precisely as that – a figment that signifies as Black to engender gender and sex plenitude, a catachresis that is merely one figment, amongst others, that summons the history and present of racial slavery to produce an imagination of infinite plasticity. By treating Fruit as symptomatic of this structure, though not entirely representative of it, this article does not attempt to address this irresolvable evidentiary crisis but provokes it by abstracting from the empirical domain of Barnes’ artistry towards the metaphysical. To cross that eternal and unviable chasm, even as the abyss remains, this article investigates the resonance of Barnes’ individual anti-Black actions and the ontology of anti-Blackness that structures this world.

Suffer for passion

Prior to the writing of Hissing Fauna, Barnes moved to Norway with their then-pregnant wife. When they arrived, Barnes found themself alienated and miserable (Nordheim, 2022). These feelings only grew as Barnes left for tour after the birth of their daughter. When Barnes returned, they were plagued by anxieties regarding their role as a ‘husband’ and ‘father’, leading Barnes to spend most of winter 2006 in what they later described as a ‘chemical depression’ (Frizzelle, 2007). With their misery challenging their relationship, the couple split briefly, during which time Barnes wrote the first half of Hissing Fauna.

Apparently penned in the same order as they appear on the album, these tracks trace Barnes’ psychological development through their burgeoning isolation. In the beginning, Barnes tries to keep their relationship afloat (‘Suffer for Fashion’), ⁶ but soon they cannot ‘even pretend that you are my friend’ (‘Cato as a Pun’). Dealing with this latent, looming heartbreak, Barnes descends into despair, failing ‘even to answer the phone’, which leads to a ‘crisis’ where Barnes begs their chemicals to ‘shift back to good again’ (‘Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse’) (Of Montreal, 2007b). Resentful of their unhappiness, Barnes ‘spent the winter with [their] nose buried in a book / While trying to restructure [their] character / ‘Cause it had become vile to its creator’ (‘Gronlandic Edit’) (Of Montreal, 2007b). The songs culminate in what has been described as the ‘centerpiece’ of the album (Flicker, 2012), ‘The Past Is a Grotesque Animal’, a ten-minute composition wherein Barnes recognises how in the past's ‘eyes, you see / How completely wrong you can be’ (Of Montreal, 2007b). With the potential of their ‘love project’ sundered, Barnes ‘flunk[s] out’, ‘gone’ but happily at least the ‘author [of their] own disaster’ (Of Montreal, 2007b). This ‘massive emotional workout’ is a stunning, pulsating, beautiful ode to a relationship that has soured (Denney, 2008). Originally, following this song, the album concluded with a ‘very sad ending’, a handful of songs where Barnes self-flagellates, disparaging themself as ‘faulty’, a ‘mistake’ and a ‘problem’ (Mitchum, 2007; Of Montreal, 2007a). Though cut from the regular version of the album, ⁷ these songs index the state that Barnes was in prior to the development of Georgie Fruit: expressing a deep desire to ‘destroy myself … I’m killing myself but it's not suicide’ (‘No Conclusion’) (Of Montreal, 2007a).

However, after the return of their wife, this intention of abandoning, erasing or escaping themself was sublimated and they were able to ‘write some new songs … That's where Georgie Fruit came in’ (Rettig, 2017). Discarding the former, morose back-half of the album, ‘The Past Is a Grotesque Animal’ was repurposed as a cocoon to dramatise how ‘all of a sudden [Barnes] became this black she-male’ (Wolk, 2007). ⁸ The record itself lends itself to this interpretation: as ‘The Past Is a Grotesque Animal’ fades out, the whirring synths and guitar quiet only momentarily before immediately returning. When the buzzing resumes, it is a mechanical reverberation that slowly adds a bass riff and then percussion before Barnes proceeds to vocalise. This Barnes is lighter, detached from the previous drama, transformed into ‘something fantastic, and bizarre, and otherworldy’ (Radford, 2008). And thus, enter Georgie Fruit.

Split selves, brains in jars

Having ‘got [their] Georgie Fruit on’, Barnes-as-Fruit exudes a prowess unimaginable on the first half of the record that coincides with a sonic shift towards more playful and fruity funk soundscapes and lyrically introduces references to violence, sexuality and Black stereotypes (Of Montreal, 2007b). On ‘Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider’, Fruit denigrates ‘Eva’ because she ‘would not know what to do with’ Georgie, for she is just some ‘faggy girl’ who lacks ‘soul power’. Fruit apparently has no need for Eva, not only because their ‘girl’ has a ‘crisp endorsement’ from the ‘C.C.A.A. Booty Patrol’ (whatever that is) but also because Fruit is still (violently) hung up on his ex, admitting a desire to hire a woman to hit this ex-girlfriend to avoid the charges of misogyny if Fruit were to have hit her himself (‘Labyrinthian Pomp’). By the time Barnes references the Black funk star Shuggie Otis on ‘Faberge Falls for Shuggie’, Fruit's relationship with their ‘girl’ is less clear but no less anti-Black. Crying that ‘she ain’t my thug no more, ain’t no kind of killer’, Fruit and their ‘girl’ still ‘arrived at number eleven / So charged and ready for slavery’ (Of Montreal, 2007b). Why Barnes or Fruit would be ‘ready for slavery’ is never addressed, but suffice it to say that these lyrics exemplify how the introduction of Fruit coincides with Barnes’ embrace of Black stereotypes and funk music.

Repeatedly in interviews Barnes returns to this idea, divulging that Fruit was a medium and justification for Barnes to play ‘Black genres of music’ without facing interrogation (Nordheim, 2022). Even in Barnes’ official apology, they note that their love of Black music was Fruit's genesis (Barnes, 2020b). Through Fruit, Barnes could finally ‘write something … more sexual and it's almost more like R&B or something … something you would find in an Ohio Players record’ (Grisham, 2008). Bypassing the ‘weird cultural restrictions’ placed on people like ‘You’re a white person, this is who you are, and you can’t really do this because that's for black people’, Fruit enabled Barnes to disregard these ‘stupid, prissy’ limits (Grisham, 2008). Fruit resolved and dramatised a tension between the racialisation of the genre and the racialisation of the artist. Fruit was what would ‘make it feel authentic’ (Nordheim, 2022). Fruit warded off critiques, as a justification or excuse to dabble in Blackness.

This use of Blackness is a time-honoured tradition amongst white performers that stems back to nineteenth-century minstrel shows, when actors would don blackface to claim authenticity for their musical expropriation and obfuscate the brutality of slavery through the production of ostensibly jovial theatrics (Hartman, 1997: 24). Like Fruit for Barnes, blackface offered a ‘visible sign’ of racial-cultural interaction that facilitated cultural extraction by resolving an imagined Black/white cultural divide (Lott, 1993: 7). Having bridged this divide via the proliferation of minstrelsy, this requirement for a visual relation between race and culture (i.e. blackface) eventually ‘wither[ed] away’ in the mid-twentieth century (Lott, 1993: 7). As Barnes explains, no longer is it true ‘that if you’re white you can only make “white” music authentically … Maybe it was at one point, but I think now there's so much cross pollination and intermingling of ideas and releases and cultures’ that it is no longer so segregated (Lukowski, 2010). Instead, filching other signifiers such as speech, dance or fashion suffices to ease this tension, anything to present performers as ‘being rich in Black fun’ (Lott, 1993: 20). Burnt cork no longer necessary, one can just adopt a new persona to authenticate Blackness. For though minstrelsy is commonly associated with blackface, blackface merely eased the structural relation undergirding the act of ‘love and theft’ – of musical appropriation and the rapturous desire for Blackness (Lott, 1993: 20; Luzardo, 2020: 189, 185). Deploying Fruit to ‘mitigate the culpability of their theft’ (Luzardo, 2020: 185), Barnes’ blackfaceless performances of what they considered to be Blackness to justify their pursuits in ‘Black Music’ then are not any less minstrel but are merely indexical of the structural inheritances of minstrelsy (Luzardo, 2020: 140).

In Barnes’ musical spectacles, this bequest is felt in their flaunting of inexhaustible rendering(s) of the Black body (Luzardo, 2020: 185). Whether articulating as Fruit that the height of their career is the ‘top of the funky soldier man’, randomly exclaiming ‘I hate waffle house! I ain’t trying to ask Mrs Winte for no job back’, or signing off ‘My pleasure, like a pall mall’, Barnes sought every opportunity ‘to mock, to identify with, and to enjoy the Black body on display’ (Denney, 2008; Luzardo, 2020: 164). Playing in these racial myths, in these Black stereotypes, Barnes embraced Fruit as what one of their bandmates described as a ‘fantasy realm where [they] can leave [their] troubles behind’ (Weiss, 2007). A site of pleasure and disgust, disidentification and identification, Fruit reeks of the fungibility that subtended the pleasure of the minstrel show. Fruit was an ‘abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values’ (Hartman, 1997: 21). As Saidiya Hartman (1997: 21) posits, it is this fungibility – the exchangeability and accumulative property of Blackness that both evacuates and mythologises its substance – which scaffolds Blackness as utterly affectable, malleable, detestable and desirable. It is this fungibility that undergirds how Fruit serves Barnes as a site for excision and exorcism.

This extractive capacity is expressed by Barnes when they distinguish themself as ‘a brain in a jar’ from Fruit as their ‘sexuality’ (Weiss, 2007). Or as Barnes puts it otherwise, ‘If I’m Georgie Fruit, I can say whatever I want – I can be raunchy and rude and insensitive, but it's not me’ (Wolk, 2007). Taking advantage of this distinction, Barnes deployed Fruit as a mask to sing lyrics like ‘You’re the only one with whom / I would role play Oedipus Rex / I want you to be my pleasure puss / I wanna know what it's like to be inside you’ (‘Plastis Wafer’) (Of Montreal, 2008). In this pursuit, minstrelsy would appear to offer them a space (i.e. Fruit) furnished by fungibility for the displacement of their gendered and sexual desires, an ‘imaginative surface’ safely distanced from their ego without risk of culpability or shame (Hartman, 1997: 8). Just as the distance of minstrelsy regularly permitted performers to engage in ‘prohibited explorations, tabooed associations, immodest acts, and bawdy pleasures’ (Hartman 1997: 32) for the titillation and humour of their audiences, Barnes-as-Fruit delights in this obscenity. Celebrating excess, exploitation, being ‘outrageous’ (read: violent), partying and even removing ‘all my clothes and […] masturbating in front of people’ during this period (Labate, 2008), Barnes found the freedom to be sexually and violently expressive through a veneer of alter-ego imbued with all ‘those unpleasant aspects in human nature’ (Carriere, 2007).

Playing Fruit also reportedly granted Barnes an opportunity to ‘flirt’ with queerness through wild stage costumes and effeminate performances, which was also typical for minstrel show performers (Lott, 1993: 27; Of Montreal, 2008). Illustrating Barnes’ lyric that they would not ‘take the stage straight, understand? / Under capes with druggy cock dragons’ (Of Montreal, 2007b), their tours reflected aesthetics described in the New Yorker as ‘a roving sideshow in face paint, glitter, and ruffles’ (Frere-Jones, 2009). The tours featured escalating stage antics including white dancers with afro wigs, animal masks, drag, centaur costumes, singing upon a live horse, performing nude, performing an 18 + show with porn playing behind them and introducing Barnes-as-Fruit with an instrumental transition wherein six performers puppeteered a giant crafted body with waving limbs. These theatrics emphasise the malleability of the human body, the body as puppet – key to the humour of the minstrel show – and the incoherence between self and other (Luzardo, 2020: 167). While such antics are not exclusive to minstrelsy, these performances must be read through Barnes’ admission that their onstage antics were directly related to the newfound ‘funny state of mind’ that Fruit inaugurated where they ‘really enjoyed wearing the most outrageous and unflattering outfits I could find’ (Grisham, 2008), and reports that ‘Georgie's uninhibited voice … play[ed] a large part in the group's live shows’ (Radford, 2008).

Barnes’ portrayal, then, is not only anti-Black in the shallowest sense but also concerningly indicative of the contemporary uses of minstrelsy for white self-actualisation. Fruit allowed them to be themself by being someone else: to be free, to be sexual, to be violent. Fruit, like the minstrel, was ‘elastic enough to permit white self-exploration’ (Hartman, 1997: 29). While Barnes emphasises that they ‘shouldn’t have given it any race or any gender, it should have just been completely free’ (and note ‘it’), the minstrel show aesthetics and Barnes’ own expressed relation to Blackness (and ‘Black music’) betray this notion (Nordheim, 2022). For it is Fruit's Blackness that secures Barnes's expression at a distance; their white self-fashioning is achieved by way of oscillating proximity to Blackness.

Weird experiences

Although Barnes spoke about Fruit in many interviews, they were more repetitive than expository. Nevertheless, the modest details offered concerning Fruit's backstory are unnerving. Prior to his time as the lead singer of Arousal, Fruit ‘had a lot of weird experiences and decided to be a woman, so he had a sex change’ (Ringen, 2008). Put differently, Fruit's transition was catalysed by his ‘experiences’ during his incarceration. Remarking on their song ‘St. Exquisite's Confessions’, Barnes’ hints at the tenor of these ‘weird experiences’. They tell the interviewer that the original lyrics were not ‘I was so sick of sucking the dick of this cruel cruel city’ but in fact ‘I was so used to sucking dick while I was in prison’ (LaBate, 2008). Fond of ‘the idea of this character’ who ‘got so used to sucking dick while … in prison’ that they have ‘forgotten what it's like to please a woman, or what it takes to please a woman’, Barnes finds it amusing that Fruit would ‘have to adapt to that world – you know, just suck some dick or whatever’ (LaBate, 2008). Besides assuming that sucking dick fails to please women, this statement relishes the supposedly humorous compromise of Fruit's sexual agency: Fruit had no choice but to engage in fellatio, he ‘has’ to adapt because he is in prison. Given this explanation, ‘weird’ is a euphemism that allays and alludes to the sexual violence that incarcerated people, especially Black and trans people, commonly face. As sexual violence is part and parcel of the carceral dispossession of gender, Barnes introduces a contradiction wherein somehow this sexual coercion would beget gendered will, as if the one capacitates the other: Fruit ‘had a lot of weird experiences and decided to be a woman, so he had a sex change’.

In an interview with The Quietus, Barnes again concatenates the ‘sex change’ and experience, but for their own means. Asked whether Fruit is rehabilitating Barnes’ effeminate masculinity, Barnes-as-Fruit replies in the affirmative (Denney, 2008). They are learning to ‘box’ and ‘walk right’, but also to ‘shake [their] hips’, to ‘walk on high heels’ and ‘apply lipstick’ (Denney, 2008). Not only is Fruit teaching Barnes to be feminine but Barnes is being educated on gender writ large. Though Barnes does not explain how exactly Fruit accrued this knowledge, in the same interview and again answering as Fruit, they rationalise their multiple ‘sex changes’ due to their desire to ‘eat breakfast as a woman but take the dog for a walk as a man and then watch TV as a woman again’ (Denney, 2008). Linking phenomenological experience to (the transformation of) bodily morphology, the multiple ‘sex changes’ are the pedagogy for gendered knowledge. ⁹

In the experience generated from these ‘sex changes’, Fruit broadens Barnes’ ‘gender perception’ that had been limited by their ‘suburban American’ upbringing (Nordheim, 2022). Tethering their identification with Fruit to the realisation of their being ‘somewhere in the middle, you know, a third gender or whatever’, Barnes posits that Fruit was substantial for introducing a new gendered imagination that was galvanised by the character's fluidity. These ‘sex changes’ offered an explorative and pedagogic capacity for Barnes’ own gendered endeavours (Nordheim, 2022). In this perversion of the feminist theorisation of the ‘personal is political’, Barnes overcomes the ‘epistemological lack’ of their then white masculinity by trafficking in lived experience through their cultural vestibule, through Fruit's marked body (Spillers, 1987: 67; Wiegman, 2023: 474). For Barnes only ‘said that it had multiple sex changes’ to create a character that was ‘completely fluid’, to have a gratuity of life experience from which Barnes could ‘decid[e], like how I wanted to be perceived, even just on my own level of like, how I want to perceive myself’ (Nordheim, 2022). Comprehending these ‘sex changes’ as engendered only so Barnes could negotiate their own gendered desires, either for experience or as fluidity, it would seem not so much that Fruit ‘possess[es] gender’ as that he is possessed by Barnes’ desire for gender (Hartman, 1997: 111). Fruit's ‘sex changes’ may be described by Barnes as acts of his own will but are actually performed on another's behalf. Fruit may ‘decide’ to be a woman, but it is merely another moment where Barnes ‘restage[s] the seizure and possession of the Black body for the other's use and enjoyment’ (Hartman, 1997: 32).

This affectability is inescapable for Barnes, such that even in their official apology, the artist identifies Fruit as a ‘trans persona’ for whom they ‘regret … giving … a race and gender’, enacting Fruit's gender as a gift, as a matter to be contravened at will (Barnes, 2020b). In this aspect, Fruit again resembles the minstrel as his body appears as though it has the capacity to direct its own movements (‘decides to be a woman’) even as it is overdetermined by the relations of racial slavery (Hartman, 1997: 52). Drawing on Sianne Ngai's theorisation of animatedness, Jesús Luzardo posits that this ‘racializing technology’ subtends the pleasure of the minstrel show (Ngai, 2005: 92; Luzardo, 2020: 166). Seemingly ‘simultaneously free, given its liveliness, and unfree, given its lack of agency’, the minstrel is animated, but without their own determination; a pliable puppet who is affected but never affecting (Luzardo, 2020: 166). A medium for the desires of the audience or for the ventriloquist, animatedness plies Fruit's mouth open so that he may persuade the listener that his actions are his own, that he may be Barnes’ toy, but he is also ‘ready for slavery’. This rebar of animatedness – elasticity sans will, the semblance of affective agency that dissimulates captivity – is expressed as Fruit's ‘sex changes’ appear as freedom, as choice, even as that capacity is undermined both by the hand forcing Fruit to speak and by its fictional impetus of sexual coercion. Animatedness, thus, characterises the ruse at the heart of the ostensible agential contradiction between Fruit's sexual coercion and his gendered agency.

Due to this animatedness, these ‘sex changes’ must be considered with compromised or coerced will (if any at all), as endeavours that grasp Fruit as merely ‘a territory of cultural and political maneuver’ for Barnes (Spillers, 1987: 67). Transitioning for whatever Barnes may require (like eating cereal), Fruit's gender lacks any ‘symbolic integrity’, losing his ‘motive will’ to become a polymorphous site of extraction for Barnes to mine gender (Spillers, 1987: 66–67). This scenario resonates with the condition described by Hortense Spillers as ungendering, wherein the captive party is dispossessed of their ‘active desire’ so that the captivating party can realise their own (Spillers, 1987: 67). Ungendered, the enslaved are objectified, losing gendered distinction and serving as a ‘living laboratory’ for the self-actualisation of the captivating party (Spillers, 1987: 68).

Exemplary of this is C. Riley Snorton's (2017) historicisation of James Marion Sims’ medical plantation, where Sims experimented upon ungendered Black flesh to secure the contours of white womanhood. Snorton contends that only due to the captive fungibility of the enslaved could Sims have proceeded with these experiments, as these ‘controllable patients’ (Harriet Washington, cited in Snorton, 2017: 24) were considered ‘immanently analgesic’ due to their Blackness (Snorton, 2017: 24). It would seem that Barnes, like Sims, needs Fruit captive to secure Fruit's experimental capacity. Evidencing this phenomenon is that Barnes never explains why Fruit is incarcerated in the first place. What is important for Barnes’ fantasy and for Fruit's power to catalyse Barnes’ transition is that Fruit is imprisoned, is violated, and that through this violation Fruit loses their sexual will but generates a gendered will that teaches Barnes about gender. Through this journey from incarceration to violation, Barnes finds a thrill in an individually innocuous, yet socially noxious proximity to incarceration that stimulates their artistry. But the catalyst to this process – why Barnes is incarcerated in the first place – is absent because the why is irrelevant. Fruit is Black and Blackness ensures Fruit's fungibility, ungendering and total openness to Barnes’ desires. Fruit faces ‘sex change’ after ‘sex change’ without problem for Barnes’ purposes because Fruit is captive. Without collapsing Sims’ brutality with Barnes’ art, by envisioning a total openness to a Black captive through an imagination of gratuitous ‘sex changes’ to accrue gender and sexual knowledge, Barnes employs Fruit for similar (un)gendered gains.

Sans will, it is hard to posit a distinction between Fruit's ‘sex changes’ for Barnes’ knowledge and how ungendering renders the enslaved ‘an open vulnerability to a gigantic sexualized repertoire that may be alternately expressed as male/female’ (Spillers, 1987: 77). Seemingly inextricable from how Black gender is ‘(over)determined by instability’, these ‘sex changes’ appear as just another way in which the Black body is forced to ‘take many forms’, because ‘the violence of antiblackness’ is in its very ‘morphing and (re)production’ (Douglass, 2020: 89–103). That is, what choice did Fruit have? And if Fruit had no such choice, then what differentiates these phantastical ‘sex changes’ that intimate his total dearth of symbolic integrity from the violence of ungendering, from the force of anti-Blackness? Is this not another scene of subjection? Is the ‘sex change’ not another form of ‘attributing freedom to the minstrel-qua-Black in the form of his free consent to, and his enjoyment of, his very own abjection?’ (Luzardo, 2020: 189). These ‘sex changes’, therefore, denominate less a genital medical-surgical modification, as has historically been the implication of the term, and more a fictive process of the fluidification of the flesh requisite for Barnes to propel their own internal actualisation. Agential nullification, will sans will, these ‘sex changes’ are another exhibition of the state of ‘determinate negation’ to which Fruit is captive (Hartman, 1997: 52). ¹⁰

Alligator bodies

Overdetermined by instability, Fruit appears as a liminal actor, transing and being transed daily. This overt genitalisation is congruent with the sexualisation of the slur ‘she-male’, what Whitney Strub deems an ‘inescapable historical formation in the development of trans pornography’ (2020: 188). As the ‘most common term under which trans pornography has historically been marketed’, this term for Barnes directly ties embodiment to genitals (she as a modifier of male), but too to a form of sexuality that is to be consumed and consumable (Pezzutto and Comella, 2020: 166). Having consumed Fruit, Barnes’ own liminality would seemingly be engendered on their first record following their apology. Intimating a transit from Fruit's ‘transness’ to Barnes’ nonbinariness, as if the two could index the same gendered nebula, Barnes delights in gendered plasticity. Chanting ‘I’m liminal I’m free / Call me he call me she / I said I’m macho I’m femme / Call me they call me them’, Barnes – sans Fruit – explains in this song that they have no chosen pronoun but instead embrace fluidity (Of Montreal, 2021).

While the troping of transness as fluidity has been acknowledged and problematised for decades (Halberstam, 2005; Puar 2017), a specific conceptualisation of fluidity as a form of ‘infiniteness’ is contemporarily common amongst nonbinary artists, theorists and television hosts, including Barnes. Poet and performer Alok Vaid-Menon (2021) writes, regarding their dissatisfaction with ‘the term “nonbinary” … I prefer infinity … Where they see “a man in a dress”, we see an infinite possibility of being’. Similarly, Barnes expresses, ‘I think of myself as having unlimited potential, and I can be anything. My identity is fluid’ (Rabinowitz, 2008). Associated with immateriality, this imagination of this infiniteness capacitates the fragmentation of the body for profit: every body part another gender (Puar, 2017). Coming out through an ‘iconic partnership[] with’ brands like Essie nail polish, Jonathan Van Nes reifies their nails, for instance, as a metonym for gendered being (Green, 2019). Like Barnes, Van Ness recognises a link between their infiniteness and their identity, articulating that they ‘identify as he, she or they – because I feel like I’m everything and I feel like I’m nothing at the same time’ (Peterson, 2022). Nonbinariness is as minute as your nails or as large as the universe, but what exactly would it mean to be ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ at the same time?

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that this is the ontological condition of Blackness: of plasticisation. For Jackson, slavery experimented with Blackness ‘as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter’, stretched to be ‘sub/super/human at once, a form where form shall not hold: potentially “everything and nothing” at the register of ontology’ (2020: 3). Certain enough through Fruit's overdetermination by indeterminacy (Douglass, 2020), this plasticisation scaffolds the ways in which Fruit is regarded as both a ‘sexless superhuman’ and someone who ‘bounc[es] around between genders’, both the nadir and apex of sex-gender, both that which lacks gender and that which is beyond gender (Ringen, 2008; Nordheim, 2022). Deploying Blackness as the ‘experimental means for exploring the possibilities and boundaries’ of life, plasticisation enacts Blackness, as Barnes enacts Fruit, as ‘infinitely mutable, in antiblack, often paradoxical, sexuating terms’ (Jackson, 2020: 11).

But Barnes is not claiming any such sex difference; they are claiming gendered infiniteness. As Barnes theorises, ‘identity is fluid and that you can be any character that you want, you can be whatever person you want – it doesn’t matter what your human vessel says to the rest of the world … It doesn’t have to be like, “Oh, I’m a man trapped in a woman's body” or “I’m a woman trapped in a man's body” or “I’m a Creole trapped in an alligator's body”’ (Grandy, 2008). ¹¹ Rejecting the tether between bodily and psychic transition, Barnes articulates their fluidity in contrast to the archetypal transsexual narrative. Instead, Barnes idealises Fruit as ‘unlocking a side of [themself] that transcends race, gender and history’, where Barnes professes that they want to have ‘no connection to any economic, social or psychological situation’ (Radford, 2008). With no such obligation for a relation between corporeality and psyche, and as Barnes mentions that they gave Fruit these ‘sex changes’ so that they could embrace their own freedom, they seem to share no such corresponding responsibility because they project that obligation onto Fruit (Nordheim, 2022). Fruit receives a ‘sex change’ whenever they so much as blink so that Barnes is not bound by anything at all.

Only giving Fruit these ‘sex changes’ to ensure their ‘fluidity’ (Nordheim, 2022), Fruit serves Barnes as a repository of sex, plasticised as an exploratory imaginary and as a visual, bodily confirmation of Barnes’ internal fluidity. Enacted as the physical landscape for Barnes to play ‘any character that [they] want’, Fruit guarantees Barnes’ internal liminality by way of the plasticisation of the genitalisation accorded to the figure of the Black ‘she-male’ (Nordheim, 2022). This genitalisation evinces just how once animated, ‘emotional qualities seem especially prone to sliding into corporeal qualities’ to reify race as a bodily phenomenon (Denney, 2008; Ngai, 2005: 95). Barnes’ desired ‘polymorphous persona’ becomes the figure of multiple ‘sex changes’, Barnes’ interiority stabilised in and as Fruit's exteriority; Barnes’ nonbinariness congeals against and through Fruit's she-maleness, which itself puts into relief the racialisation of this (un)gendered condition (Nordheim, 2022). Namely, Fruit is a ‘she-male’ because Fruit is a fungible, ungendered Black imago (in)vulnerable to plasticisation and tasked with signifying the totality and fluidity of sex through its dearth of symbolic integrity to capacitate Barnes’ gendered experimentation. Thus, when Barnes’ sings ‘I’m just a Black she-male’, Barnes is more than anything indexing the porosity of the Black body to violence (Of Montreal, 2008).

All at-once-ness

Exhibiting the ways in which Fruit's genitalisation is a condition of Fruit's plasticisation for Barnes’ own gendered actualisation, this transitivity between Fruit and Barnes conveys how the plasticisation of Blackness is a metaphor (re)source for Barnes’ nonbinary imaginary. This phenomenon is a transit from Barnes’ desire to Fruit's body, from an experiential phenomenon to and through an ontological condition, overdetermining Fruit as instability and capacitating Barnes to be ‘free’ from both gender and materiality. The capacity to be plasticised as everything and nothing becomes the metaphor through which Barnes imagines their own gendered ‘unlimited potential’ illustrating precisely how ‘antiblackness itself is sexuating’ (Jackson, 2020: 8). Plasticity for Barnes is both method and metaphor.

In this experimentation in plenitude, Barnes names the ‘Black she-male’ as the closest approximation to a character where ‘nobody could say what it was, it wasn’t specifically anything’ as it was more of a ‘chameleon’ and less a ‘specifically black transgender character’ (Nordheim, 2022). The ‘Black she-male’ was the vestibule to and for infinity, to what Claire Colebrook describes as ‘a not-yet differentiated singularity from which distinct genders, race[s], species, sexes, and sexualities are generated in a form of relative stability’ (cited in Snorton, 2017: 5). As all signifiers must, Fruit fails to capture this indistinct totality. Instead, despite the aspiration for Fruit to capture a wholeness of sex/gender, Fruit is always-already de/retransitioned, always already returning to he/it pronouns, never referred to as ‘she’ in the present day. Played onstage and in interviews through an ostensibly Black (effeminate) masculinity, Barnes plays Black trans as anything save for the Black (trans) woman.

That Fruit is named as a ‘she-male’ then in nearly every interview but is never represented as a woman is more than telling of Barnes’ transmisogynoir, but indicative of how what Jackson calls the Black mater(nal) may ‘serve[] an enabling function’; its totality can be felt as a ‘condition of possibility’ but cannot be known: it is ‘nonrepresentable’ (2020: 97). ¹² As Jackson argues, representation is impossible as the Black mater(nal) is not an identity or standpoint but a ‘boundless’ index of the ‘sexuating logics of trace and its effects’ that registers both Blackness as matter and Blackness as mother (2018: 630). Pointing ‘toward a web of entangled signifiers such as black(ened) femininity, womanhood, maternity, natality, materiality, and relation to the mother (again)’, the Black mater(nal) is a void, foreclosed from representation as it is what potentiates representation (Jackson, 2018: 630). Its totality, its ‘all at-once-ness’, is impossible to behold (Jackson, 2018: 630). The Black mater(nal)'s impossibility is exactly why, as æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil avers, Frantz Fanon exclaims in Black Skin, White Masks regarding the Black woman, ‘We know nothing about her’ (Fanon, cited in hollis o’neil, 2018: 35). At best, Jackson posits, the Black mater(nal) may function as myth, and it is this mythologisation that is on view in Fruit (Jackson, 2018: 630). Fruit is a veneer, a black hole, ‘a placeholder, a floating signifier that conceals a more aberrant void’, never representing the Black mater(nal) but rather indexing Black womanhood's relation to and abjection from sexuation and representation (hollis o’neil, 2018: 32). Fruit is Barnes’ best effort to grasp the totality and dearth of sex, the ‘everything and nothing’, the totality of the One and sex difference cum unity that is unrepresentable. Fruit is a proxy for this Black mater(nal), localising the plasticity of Blackness as the potential to imagine contemporary forms of gendered plasticity, of nonbinariness. ‘Liminally situated in a kind of metaphysical drag, revealing the vestimentary quality of identity that only works to disguise structural positioning’, Fruit is the vestibule that conceals and contains the abjection of the Black mater(nal) (hollis o’neil, 2018: 32; emphasis in original).

Exorcising some like weird sex demon: a brief conclusion

To covertly revel in this Black mater(nal), the ‘sex change’ is employed by Barnes not only in lyrics and interviews but also in their apologetics. Barnes continues to donate 50 per cent of the proceeds from Skeletal Lamping to The National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, and Barnes may have apologised for the ‘cheap tropes’ and ‘gross mischaracterization of Black Trans life’ (Barnes, 2020b) but has replaced only the lyric ‘she-male’ on ‘Wicked Wisdom’ (2020b); ¹³ the rest of the record remains. Retained are the lyrics on ‘Georgie's Lament’ about ‘fantasies of slave uprisings’, Isaac Hayes, torn-up cocks and parole officers (Of Montreal, 2012a). When you listen to ‘Faberge Falls for Shuggie’, you can still hear Barnes emulate both Otis and Prince because the latter often sounded as if they were ‘exercising some like weird sex demon. Yeah, because like the Georgie Fruit character is a very sexual character’ (Nordheim, 2022). Even on ‘Wicked Wisdom’, the supplement of ‘powdered belle’ for ‘Black she-male’ does not end the sexualisation of Fruit as Barnes sings ‘When we get together / It's always hot magic’ (Of Montreal, 2007b). This only compounds with Barnes’ decision to continue to perform live (some of) the songs that they wrote as Fruit. Barnes is not performing ‘Wicked Wisdom’ anymore, but eight of their ten most played tracks are those from Hissing Fauna and the freedom on offer is not so easily rent from the Blackness of its source (setlist.fm, n.d.). Lyrically and sonically, Fruit is alive and well, Fruit's sex-gender trouble is now just slightly less visible. Fruit may no longer be referred to as a ‘she-male’, but Fruit's Blackness still structures the record.

I do not raise this distinction to shame Barnes for responding half-heartedly. ¹⁴ Rather, I raise this distinction between expunging the slur and the conservation of the rest of the record because Barnes’ restricted redress is productive in as much as it displays the craggy terrain of potential repair between transphobia and anti-Blackness. Though Barnes does apologise to ‘trans people’ and ‘Black trans people’, in an interview question responding to why they removed the term, Barnes puts into relief who they are actually addressing: ‘I don’t want to offend trans people. You know, that is the last thing [I’d] want to do’ (Nordheim, 2022). Isolating ‘she-male’ as the most egregious aspect of an otherwise distasteful display, never remedying the influence of Blackness upon the record (and how would they?), Barnes’ focalisation of trans suffering would seemingly render them unable to fathom Blackness outside of contingency. As much as ungendering ‘as a mode of violence … makes black fungibility palpable’ (Snorton, 2017: 83), Barnes’ attention to remedy this most obvious aspect of their materialisation of ungendering (these ‘sex changes’) actually obfuscates the wider ‘material staging ground’ of fungibility.

Examining this risk that Black grammars of suffering may be elided through the focalisation of gender, Patrice Douglass tarries with the ways in which the incarceration of Assata Shakur has been overdetermined by her placement in a men's prison. Even as the Black revolutionary's biography is unfortunately filled with ‘many more instances of state-inflicted violence’, Douglass finds that her placement in this prison is ‘given the most individualized focus of any instance of violence in the book’ (Douglass, 2020: 93). This lack of gendered ‘symbolic integrity’ is even the evidence that Shakur's lawyer, Lennox S. Hinds, mobilises to obtain empathy from readers in his foreword to the text. Due to the dissonance between the multitude of violence and this focus on her misgendering, Douglass argues that Hinds portrays ‘misgendering … as a grand scale harm’, which betrays the fact that misgendering is ‘a condition of Black gender, writ large’, as one of the myriad forms of ungendering (Douglass, 2020: 94). Douglass therefore asks, ‘given that the text is saturated with violence, why find focused empathy in this particular moment, when Shakur is assumedly denied the recognition of womanhood? What makes this violence different or distinct?’ (2020: 94).

These questions resonate with my analysis of Fruit: why focus on these ‘sex changes’ when the rest of Fruit's career is merely as an ungendered prop? Are the other forms of ungendering dissimulated when focused on only this most visible? Couching this article in theorisations of minstrelsy, animateness and plasticity, it has been my intention to avoid this implication. Instead, I have hoped to contend with the ways in which Fruit's ‘sex changes’ perform the flip side to that of Hinds’ manoeuvre. Where Shakur's misgendering is written about to attain empathy, to be recognised as a site of violence, Fruit's ungendering is ambiguated by way of an ostensible agency, to reduce the question of this violence by justifying Barnes’ portrayal of Fruit for their own gendered self-actualisation. To expand on Douglass’ point to consider this grammar of suffering as actually concealing the tendrils of anti-Blackness, I have hoped to elucidate that any such grammar is ill fitting for Fruit in the first place. That is because Fruit is not so much trans as transgendered.

While the term has been rejected by the mainstream for failing to characterise either the agency or the temporality of transness, hollis o’neil (2018) provides an alternative valence for ‘transgendered’ in their analysis of Taye Diggs’ performance in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Exploring how Diggs’ performance transforms the role, hollis o’neil theorises that ‘the Black is both transgendered and ungendered, the former's negative foil and the constitutive exclusion of gender formation more broadly’ (2018: 36). hollis o’neil neither uses the term again nor expands upon why she chose this term, but the coupling of ungendered and transgendered together provides a provocation in how transgendered could be encountered as a technology of ungendering. ¹⁵ Thinking with hollis o’neil, it is precisely because the term has been abandoned since, as Julia Serano maintains, that transgendered seems like a forced status, like ‘something has been done to us’, that it may accurately characterise a tool of ungendering (Steinmetz, 2014). To be transgendered could name the trafficking of trans politics into the ungendered position, the wanton use of Blackness in a fraught subjectification through transness, the state of not being trans but being made trans. ¹⁶ Transgendered performs a critique of the supposed sameness intimated between Fruit and Barnes. It is a specificity that permits naming this violence by decoupling the ostensible apposition of Blackness and transness in its articulation of a distinction in agency and capacity. Transgendered provides language for encounters when a veneer of trans subjectivity is merely indexical of the plasticity of Blackness, returning the conversation to how the ‘the (un)gendering of Blackness is tethered by Black subjection’ (Douglass, 2020: 94).

Employing Barnes and Fruit as a case study, this article demonstrates how the ungendering of Blackness may be dissimulated and entrenched further by the ostensible transness of both the author and their figments. Contending with the confluence of plasticisation and animatedness, this article has illuminated the legacies of the minstrel show and its concomitant relationship to at least one form of gendered actualisation. Through this analysis, I have proposed that the figure of the ‘she-male’ registers the violability of Blackness and the accordance of sex itself to Blackness. Querying the likeness of the plasticisation of Fruit and Barnes’ liminality, the metaphorisation of Black plasticity is revealed as concomitant with Barnes’ conceptualisation of nonbinariness. Grappling with this function of Fruit, this article has nuanced the apposition of Blackness and transness through this case study. Although a peculiar example, Barnes and Fruit may hold insight for other forms of gendered actualisation in their reliance upon (anti-)Blackness for gendered exploration and play.