A Black Queer and Trans Theory Approach to Troubling Inclusion, Best Practices, and LGBTQ Research

• In Event: Future Directions in Queer of Color Scholarship Across Educational Settings

Abstract

LGBTQ scholarship in higher education studies has increased over the last 20 years (Author, 2019b; Renn, 2010). Notably, trans studies in higher education have taken a critical turn marked by several factors, one being the growing number of research studies by trans scholars (e.g., Catalano, 2017; Jourian et al., 2015; Marine & Nicolazzo, 2014; Pitcher, 2017; Stewart, 2017a). However, only a few studies (Jourian, 2017; Nicolazzo, 2016) center the experiences of trans people of color. More specifically, one peer-reviewed article has been written about Black trans people in higher education (Nicolazzo, 2016). Though this lack of research is troubling, LGBTQ scholars have also been unwilling to engage critical and poststructural frameworks (Author, in press), including QOCC. Ultimately, this conceptual paper argues that the central concepts of inclusion and visibility that inform LGBTQ scholarship fail to address anti-blackness and settler colonialism.

Through the engagement of Black Queer and Trans Theories (Ellison et al., 2017; Johnson, 2016), I reframe the conversation about LGBTQ inclusion through the questions: Which LGBTQ people have the possibility of being included in higher education? What does the logic of inclusion to maintain or challenge oppression? Drawn from afro-pessimism, I argue that the foundation of the United States’ political and cultural structures of anti-blackness and settler colonialism make Black inclusion into the nation-state and higher education impossible.

To demonstrate how LGBTQ research is complacent in anti-blackness, I discuss the best practice of “asking pronouns,” contending that it is what Sara Ahmed (2012) would consider non-performative. Non-performatives are speech acts that state an action, but do not perform the action being spoken, thus allowing words of inclusion to move around the university while maintaining whiteness (Ahmed, 2012). Using Butler’s (1990) theory of performativity to theorize the non-performative, Ahmed (2012) argued that non-performatives are insidious because they purport to do something while doing nothing. I suggest that not only is “asking pronouns” non-performative, but may increase the likelihood of violence for Black trans people given how stating one's pronouns make some trans people more visible (Gossett et al., 2017).

In conversations with Black queer and trans theories, non-performatives provide a framework to examine best practices beyond the surface of words or actions. Second, non-performative analyses open spaces to think about the impact of best practices on student populations and if they produce the desired effect for all students. Lastly, non-performative analysis helps question what is happening to higher education structures when LGBTQ-inclusive moves are made.

The implications of this essay are numerous. First, implications suggest that one must be hesitant to ask pronouns uncritically. Secondly, one must engage in the paradox of inclusion rhetoric that rests in the moves to create processes that allow trans students to change one's gender markers and name within current university systems. Third, researchers can no longer start from epistemological norms of whiteness when theorizing trans subjectivity. Fourth, LGBTQ researchers and practitioners should resist projects rooted in visibility, recognition, inclusion, and intelligibility as it betrays investment in whiteness, settler logics, and anti-blackness as norms.

Author

• Romeo Jackson