My Pronouns Are Fuck ICE: Transgender Latinxs and the Politics of Identity in Higher Education

• In Event: Identity Politics, Education, and the Latinx/e Community

Abstract

Using student pláticas within a student center on campus, I discuss students’ experiences of trans inclusion on the college campus. These narratives unpack how coloniality, race, gender, location, and ethnicity are tied to how one lives one's gender and offer a phenomenology of how gender equity and trans inclusion are experienced, negotiated, and used in students’ engagements with the university. I focus on students’ trans* wellness practices, achieved via a “praxis of loving illegality” that begins with the recognition of land and communal relations. This practice structures a form of relational being that actively refuses the logic of “multicultural transgender inclusion” as structured under the coloniality of being, gender, and knowledge (Lugones, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2002) within the university.

Author

• Omi Salas-SantaCruz, Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author