Femme Disabled of Color Educational Futurities: Co-Theorizing Softness as Queer Joy

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Queer and Trans Futurities Imagined Through Mind, Body, and Spirit (Table 23)

Abstract

Three Indigenous, three racialized, and two white femme disabled educators and older youth (18-29) co-theorized “soft” education during a femme futurity dream-mapping (Author, 2023) project. “Softness” (Schwartz, 2020) is a relational ethic rooted in femme disabled of colour, Indigenous, and Black feminist perspectives (e.g. Kafai, 2021; Nash, 2011; Piepnza-Samarisihna, 2018; TallBear, 2018). Co-researchers imagined softness as a non-binaristic relational time/space that allows tenderness and hardness to co-exist messily. Heeding different scholars’ calls for queer joy (Duran & Sintos Colomas, 2023; Tristano, 2022; Wright, 2023), this paper argues that yearning for and attempting to embody softness is a form of learning to want (Tuck, 2009; Tuck, 2018) that holds potential for queer and trans educational futurities.

Author

• Lindsay Cavanaugh, University of Toronto