A Remedy of Hap: What Education Can Learn from Transgender Scholarship

• In Event: Trans-Queering the Repair Train: Performing Research as Remedy

Abstract

Both Sara Ahmed’s (first published) argument against ‘happiness’ (2010) and Lauren Berlant/Lee Edelman’s interrogation of ‘optimism’ (2013) (and Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, 2011) argue for what becomes possible when constraining histories, not-histories, or social imperatives are eschewed. In this performance, I perform complaint about the ubiquity of binaries, especially in education research, and what might become possible when forming subjectivity not in opposition to the other, but in relation to. Not in contrast to the not-me, but using Munoz’s (2017) notion of queer futurity, gesturing toward the both/and, the not-yet me coinciding with the was-me and already-am-me. This argument also rejects the imperative of a kind of ‘happiness’ upon ‘arrival’ at a desired destination. Like Berlant and Edelman’s view of sex through a film of the ‘unbearable’, this performance decouples transgender orientations and practices from the supposed optimism of ‘arriving’ at one’s ‘true’ gender and achieving ‘happiness’. Like educational ‘attainment’, trans enquiry is not mono-directional or singularly defined.The methods proposed for this presentation are performance poetry, a kind of performance storytelling which is used with powerful effect in critical autoethnography (Spry, 2001) and performance studies. In keeping with the Arts & Inquiry SIG, performance is central to teaching, learning and education scholarship, and the ways in which the work of the academy becomes impactful outside of the academy. The data informing this performance is from my lived experience as a transgender scholar, performer, teacher, colleague and fellow-traveller. As always, my lived experience includes interpreted experiences of other trans folks in my life, and as such includes informal snowball sampling. Performative autoethnography argues that the ethnographic study of one’s own experiences through arts in all their intentions, attentions, and expressions are strong tools for study and building knowledge (Author, 2023; Spry, 2001) and performance studies. In keeping with the Arts & Inquiry SIG, performance is central to teaching, learning and education scholarship, and the ways in which the work of the academy becomes impactful outside of the academy. The data informing this performance is from my lived experience as a transgender scholar, performer, teacher, colleague and fellow-traveller. As always, my lived experience includes interpreted experiences of other trans folks in my life, and as such includes informal snowball sampling. By resisting contemporary waves of retraction and injustice in education, this presentation reminds us that our bodies and voices are central to that resistance, and that speaking and embodying alternative futures is a powerful tool against oppression. Attention to the scholarship of justice education through trans scholarship and performance presents a queering of the old, an invitation in multiple ways to an expansive, embodied present, and models some important synthesising approaches to education that would benefit all by rejecting fear and territorialism, product-obsession, and by integrating affect, emotion, the body and self-knowledge within creative educational endeavour. By recommitting to a rejection of dualisms, the synergies become self-evident.

Author

• Daniel X. Harris, RMIT University