You Can Tell a Butch Queen: Predictable Desire and the Internalization of Surveillance Capitalism

This paper examines how a particular strand of Black gay consumer culture has become complicit in its own surveillance through what I term "predictable desire." Drawing on Michel Foucault's theory of internalized power, Simone Browne's genealogy of anti-Black surveillance, and Denise Ferreira da Silva's critique of the "transparent-I," the paper argues that the normalization of Black gay desire—expressed through repetitive aesthetics, digital performance, and aspirational consumption—renders Black gay subjects, particularly the ‘butch queen,’ mathematically predictable and therefore controllable. Against this condition, I propose a Christian practice of mystical discernment, rooted in Howard Thurman's mysticism and Georges Bataille's theory of sacrifice, as a mode of radical detachment. Reading Matthew 5:29–30 theologically and phenomenologically, the paper calls for a thoroughgoing destabilization of the sedimented self—not self-destruction, but an ecstatic, Spirit-led dispossession that disrupts the surveillance economy by making the Black gay subject harder to track, to sell, or to contain.