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

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.