Trans Fury and Bi-Erasure

In recent years, scholars have focused on the politics of race in Shakespeare&s;s plays; however, their attention still remains on monoracial performance. This focus obscures the ways mixed race performance functions on stage and screen, such as in Sophie Okonedo&s;s Queen Margaret in the 2016 Hollow Crown: War of the Roses series and Cleopatra in The National Theatre&s;s 2018 production of Antony and Cleopatra . Noting how erasure affects multiple nonbinary identities pertaining to gender and sexuality, this essay uses Susan Stryker&s;s theory of “trans fury” — that emotion is capable of revising and affirming trans identity — to ask how Shakespeare&s;s queens also use fury, broadly defined, as a method of nonbinary visibility and what affect such performances may produce on societies whose normative politics insist upon binarism. Through an analysis of Okonedo&s;s Shakespearean queens, as well as their connections to other mixed race performances, this essay argues that mixed race fury dismantles the binary logic of White supremacism that positions hetero- and cis-normative Whiteness against the racialized Other.