Reflecting upon the intellectual and political preoccupations that unify those theorizing and imagining at the intersection of Black feminist thought/theory, critical race theory, and queer studies, what emerges is how the rampant racialized violences that continue to operate in the “wake” (Sharpe 2016) of the transatlantic slave trade and settler-colonialism shape BIPOCs’ contemporary experiences of subjugation and performances of subversion. Contemplating the racist mechanisms that seek to restrain bodies of colour in place alongside the oppositional techniques that queer, trans, and gender non-conforming BIPOCs persistently employ to claim their bodies in space, this special issue asks: if BIPOC bodies are so often situated through the twinned sites of racist desire and racist derision, how can our bodies be re-appropriated, re-modelled, or re-imagined as sites of subversion as we inhabit them in ways that repel, problematize or taunt the racist gaze?