Trans* of Color Critique in Education

• In Event: Envisioning Futures for Queer and Trans* Latina/o/x Students in Education

Abstract

Unlike recent studies on transgender college students’ experiences that frame “transgender” as a discrete category of gender and ethnographic analysis, I follow decolonial philosophy to problematize gender universality (Lugones, 2020) in gender equity research design and empirical studies focused on racialized trans subjects. In turn, I approach the study of trans* Latinidad as a resistant sociality from a Latinx and decolonial philosophy of ontological and existential pluralism (Anzaldúa, 1987; Lugones, 2007; Ortega, 2016) to analyze trans Latinx students’ complex and multiplicious trans* experiences of being, embodiment, and materialities (DiPietro, 2019) in their encounter with (white) monocultural trans pedagogies structured by the university. In doing so, I advance a trans* of color critique centered on the participants’ multifaceted perspectives on identity, Third Gender social organization, and Third Gender imaginations in response to the pedagogies of “learning to be” trans and Latina/o/x in the university under hegemonic conceptions of Western/Eurocentric identity models that structure transgender equity policies and services in the university. This shift is to understand the impact of coloniality in the various “cistems” at play in higher education.

Author

• Omi Salas-SantaCruz, Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author