Drawing Utopia: Trans Youth, Comics, and the Queerness of World-Making

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

Abstract

This paper examines the creative world-making practices trans youth engage in as they navigate cisheteronormative spaces, both within and beyond school. While pursuing a yearlong, school-based ethnography in Western Canada, I simultaneously conducted research with a participant outside of school. Kay, a queer Filipinx, trans non-binary young person was apprehensive about gender policing at their school. Therefore, we co-created an alternative study together. We went on field trips around the city, attended workshops and poetry slams, and frequented youth drop-ins. Kay also drew comics depicting alternative renderings of transphobic and racist moments in their days. In this paper, I will perform a close reading of their artwork as well as engage with their narrative explanations. I am interested in how Kay, through their comics, imagined the queer and trans world they needed and desired. I think of world-making as both a form of labour and a creative practice. In the absence of adults’ desire for youth to be queer and trans, Kay performed the labor to cultivate desire for an expansive trans identity. I take seriously that it was through drawing comics that Kay could explore and access this spaciousness about gender. Trans youth who often aren’t legible, like Kay, are not offered easy access through available ‘doors’ (Spade, 2011). Notably, “in addition to doors that are always already traps, there are trapdoors, those clever contraptions that are not entrance nor exits but secret passageways that take you someplace else, often someplace yet unknown” (Tourmaline et al., 2017, p. xxiii). Thinking alongside the concept of trapdoors as well as José Muñoz’s work on queer utopia, I consider how Kay turned to comics to not only navigate the cisheteronormativity of their school but to make queer and trans worlds of their own. I theorize comics as interactions between the creator and the reader, visual texts that convey meaning in a unique manner (McCloud, 1994). Drawing on that framework, I read Kay’s comics as trapdoors, ways to both escape transphobia and racism and to dream into reality a queerer world. I draw on data from a co-constructed ethnography with a trans non-binary young person in Western Canada. The study was grounded in queer and poststructural ethnography, which underscores “the inevitable tensions of knowledge as partial, as interested, and as performative of relations of power” (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000, p. 38). Though the initial plan was to conduct this study as a school-based ethnography at Kay’s high school, we worked together to create a project that aligned with their needs as a trans youth of colour who experienced surveillance in school. I turn to comic scholars to interrogate drawing comics as a utopic world-making practice (McCloud, 1994; Scott & Fawaz, 2018).

Author

• LJ Slovin, University of Victoria