Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions equating penetration with mastery and receptiveness with subjugation. This talk tracks instead how white desires for sexual submission to Black and brown men operate as white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly those of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin—all of which find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth century writings of Theodore Winthrop and the turn-of-the-century photography of F. Holland Day. For Winthrop and Day, bottoming fantasies facilitate transfeminine embodiment, staging an experience of womanhood predicated upon the racist contrast between their own penetrable white bodies and the bodies of nonwhite men they see as impenetrable and virile. Taken together, both figures offer a cautionary tale about how contemporary politics of white trans and queer self-actualization all too often replicate white supremacist logics—then as well as now.
