Building Our Capacities to Breathe Through Queer and Trans Epistemologies

• In Event: Counter-Storytelling for Queer & Trans Epistemic Justice

Abstract

Objective: This paper will center Black, Indigenous and Palestinian Queer and Trans epistemologies to explore how the knowledge produced by these groups move us towards a world where we can all breathe. As breath is restricted, aspiration is an act of putting breath back into our lungs (Sharpe, 2016). It is an act to produce abolition against the current dominant epistemologies (re)produce racial hierarchies, class divisions, gendered binaries, to desire air not from this world but air of otherwise possibility (Crawley, 2017). A desire for air otherwise where Black, Indigenous, Palestinian, and Queer and Trans Life will not be marked for disposability but a world where life would be boundless. This paper will examine how these groups create new formations of kinship, other ways to care for one another, and ways of being that center practices of reciprocal care.
Theoretical framework: This paper will draw from Queer and Trans of Colour Critique which illuminates the intersections of race, class, gender, sex, citizenship and other intersecting identities that reinforce oppressive systems of colonialism, cis-heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and state governance (Omi Salas-Santa Cruz, 2021; Ferguson, 2018). It disrupts universal experiences of Queer and Transness that center whiteness and centers the epistemologies of those that are marked as surplus and for state violence. Centering Queer and Trans People of Colour epistemologies moves us towards abolition and changing the underlying conditions through which punishment has become the norm (Gilmore, 2022). Abolition is about changing the ways through which we relate to each other and working towards building a world that attends to life, rather than capital. It is a political commitment to create a world where we can breathe air otherwise.
Modes of inquiry and data sources: This paper is a conceptual piece that will utilize a co-theorization of Queer and Trans epistemologies and abolition theory as a mode of inquiry, drawing from scholarship across disciplines. Through centering Queer and Trans epistemologies this pushes us towards an abolitionist framework that not only recognizes the interconnectedness of racial capitalism, cis-heteropatriarchy, colonialism, carcerality and moves us towards imagining and creating radical different worlds, beyond capitalist, cis-heteronormative and colonial ways of being.
Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view and Significance of work: This paper demonstrates the importance of Black, Indigenous and Palestinian Queer, Two-Spirited and Trans epistemologies in theorizing abolition and what they can teach us about creating radically different worlds. It is significant because it theorizes Black, Indigenous, Palestinian, and Queer, Two-Spirited and Trans Life as sites of knowledge production. Through centering these communities’ epistemologies it opens us up to the endless possibilities of radically different worlds and can teach us new modes of kinship, how to develop new ways and infrastructures of care, and help teach us how to build worlds that attends to life and how to create the capacity and possibility for a world where we can all breath.

Author

• Alexander Vesuna, University of Toronto - OISE