Theory in the Flesh as Digital Activism: AfroLatina Trans-Femme Resisting at School

• In Event: “Politic Born of Necessity”: Latina and Latinx Feminists Remembering Genealogies, Imagining Futures

Abstract

Objective
My paper offers a muxerista portrait (Flores, 2017) of a former high school student, an AfroLatinx trans-femme who reads, responds to, and draws from Black feminist theory to inform her oppositional online writing, trans identity work, and healing activism. Framed by Black and Latina feminist theories and trans* and queer of color critique, I examine how my student’s digital Black feminism (Steele, 2021) resists cis-heteropatriarchal notions of white “pretty privilege” (Mock, 2017). Instead, my student embraces an erotic (Lorde, 1984) and self-loving recognition of her AfroLatinx trans femme identity. She imagines Black trans-feminist futures that reject toxic and outdated norms. Her trans* of color liberatory politics call for dismantling systems of oppression as well as for AfroLatinx curriculum in schools.

Theoretical framework, modes of inquiry, data source
Using muxerista portraiture (Flores, 2017; Lawrence-Lightfoot & Hoffman Davis, 1997) with Latina feminist narrative inquiry (Latina Feminist Group, 2001), I trace how my former high school student reads and draws from Black feminist theory to read her AfroLatinx trans-femme identity through a blog post she wrote in my course on Black and Latina feminisms.

Inspired by Anzaldúa, Flores sees muxerista portraiture as a methodology that involves “reconstruction and reframing” fragments of identities, memories, and archival materials and “putting the pieces together in a new way . . .[as] an ongoing process of making and unmaking” (Keating 2009 cited in Flores, 2017). As I construct the fragments of this portrait, I center my student’s experiences as a Black Dominican trans-femme. Christopher Busey instructs us to “be mindful of how the singular ontological mapping of Latinxs as Brown situates Black and Indigenous identities as ‘second-tier’ Latinidades” (Busey & Silva, 2020). For that reason, I trace how my student engages in her own Afro-Latinx trans-femme feminist critique (Brockenbrough, 2015; Green & Bey, 2017; Zhang, 2022, forthcoming), and explore how she applies “theory in the flesh”(Anzaldua & Moraga, 1981) to her body, her writing, and her activism.

I engage with my student’s writing alongside the fragments of my own teaching materials and memory. I return to my Latina feminist archive of syllabi and curricula. Informed by an ever-iterative and shifting entanglement of Black feminism (Collins, 2009; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984) and Black trans-feminism (Green & Bey, 2017; Smythe, 2022) alongside trans femme of color critique (Zhang, 2022, forthcoming) and queer of color critique (Brockenbrough, 2015; Ferguson, 2004) as well as AfroLatinx critical race theory (Busey & Silva, 2020), this muxerista portrait illustrates how my former student imagines AfroLatinx trans-feminist futures.

Significance
Brockenbrough asks for research that centers “curricular and pedagogical strategies” that uplift the “agentive practices of queer students of color” to counterbalance “discourses that reify narratives of youth victimization” (p. 38). If we are dedicated to the “work that promises a futurity, something that is not quite here,” as Muñoz writes (2009), then we must make trans* and queer of color feminist pedagogies a reality for our students in the here and now rather than wait for impossible “prison house” schools to change on their own (2009).

Author

• Ileana Jiménez, Stony Brook University - SUNY