Decolonial Queer and Trans Ecologies Part I (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

“Queer, as in madly in love with the burning world” —radical emprints

Decolonial queer and trans ecologies offer creative, multi-species engagements that contend with racial capitalism, climate change, and “atmospheres of violence” (Stanley 2021) from the peripheries and interstices of late-stage American empire. The questions and provocations of decolonial queer and trans ecologies have been animating artistic, humanistic, scientific, and interdisciplinary inquiry in a variety of forms for more than a decade. An emergent field in conversation with Black and Indigenous feminisms, environmental justice movements, disabled ecologies, intersectional science and technology studies, and ecological art, decolonial queer and trans ecologies theorizes and analyzes the ecological violences of colonial extraction and the promise of radical relational work and resistance movements on multiple scales, with many forms of matter (and mattering), and from/with different geopolitical locations. Our 2025 American Studies Association panels specifically build on two recent conversations in decolonial queer and trans ecologies: the 2023 Queer and Trans* Ecologies Symposium and the 2024 “Trans* Ecologies” issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly. The back-to-back panels feature scholars in a variety of careers and career stages on the cutting edge of these fields who extend this work through anti-racist, anti-colonial theorizations and analyses in the contemporary moment when the United States federal government seeks to eliminate us and our scholarship. We convene at ASA to connect to friends, lovers, and comrades to co-create insurgent knowledges that support our lives and the altered, damaged, sick, surprising, and strange life on this planet.

Part of a queer and trans ecologies conversation across two sessions, this panel heeds the conference’s call to imagine an American Studies, and likewise, the relations between empire and embodiment “from the standpoint of elsewhere”: elsewhere from bodily distinctions reliant on colonialist naming and separating, elsewhere from knowledge systems bent on containment and exclusion. Instead, we think from bodies and bodies of thought that remain committed to insurgent forms of relation. Each paper on this panel invites us to confront the fluidity of boundaries and barriers, marking the spaces between and among as sites for insurgency—and reimagining. Yates engages with sweat as liquid matter that challenges binaristic boundaries between illness and health, object and subject, matter and non-matter. Boundaries, as Yates shows, are porous—they are only sustained by limited definitions that always exclude peripheral relations. In conversation with Sky Hopinka’s Malina: Towards the Ocean, Gómez-Barris explores “subjectless forms of decolonial critique” that appear in films and writing, which operate as means of telling new stories about non-binary beingness and relation. And Blackston and Weil—thinking analytically-materially with trans and environmental barriers such as south Georgia’s Cumberland Island and south Florida’s coral reefs—develop an experimental political choreography that seeks to transform analytic practices of extracting and naming by exploring other methods of being and relating.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Tidal Returns in the Colonial Anthropocene - Macarena Gómez-Barris, Brown University

• Being Barrier: Islands, Reefs, and Other Trans Life - Dylan McCarthy Blackston, New Mexico State University; Abraham B Weil, University of Kansas

Chair

• Erin L. Durban, University of Minnesota

Comment

• micha cardenas, University of California Santa Cruz

Biographical Information

Dylan McCarthy Blackston is an assistant professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at New Mexico State University. His training, research, and teaching are in the areas of trans studies, trans ecologies, feminist studies, critical life and animal studies, sexuality studies, queer theory, and visual culture studies. He is co-editor of the recently published collection, The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge 2022) and a General Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke U Press). He is currently working on his first monograph, Trans Relations: How Capital Makes and Changes Kinds, which examines the socio-cultural circulation of three figures—the dolphin, the ape, and the pig—to make evident how we define and redefine life and its value(s) at moments of political and social transition.

micha cárdenas, PhD, MFA, is an artist, author and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the director of the Critical Realities Studio. Her debut novel Atoms Never Touch (AK Press 2023) imagines trans latina love crossing multiple quantum realities. Her academic monograph Poetic Operations : Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke UP 2022) was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association “for groundbreaking monographs in women’s studies that makes significant multicultural feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship”. cárdenas was a winner of the 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman artist award. She is currently working on her next academic monograph After Man: Fires, Oceans and Climate Justice, as well as The Probability Engine, a multi-disciplinary artwork imagining futures of climate justice. She is a first generation Colombian American.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author of four books and dozens of essays and interviews on environmental media, decolonial theory and praxis, queer femme and creative and embodied research methods and what she deems as “antidotes to the colonial Anthropocene.”
Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering and include her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In it, she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. Her first book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009) traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. She shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital. Her co-edited volume with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe. Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.
Macarena is author of numerous articles and essays in art catalogues as well as peer reviewed journals on visual, multimedia and performing arts. She was the recent co-curator of Back to Earth: Queer Ecologies at the Serpentine Gallery, a two-day symposium on queerness, transitivity and fluid matters (2022), and was featured on the podcast Back to Earth: Queer Currents. She is an internationally sought-after speaker on the environment and extractivism as well as solution-based, grounded and liquid frameworks, for undoing a “no future” paradigm.
Most recently, she received the Pratt Institute Research Recognition Award (2021-2022) and the University of California, Santa Cruz Distinguished Alumni Award (2021-2022). She was Fulbright fellow at Sociology and Gender Department in FLACSO Ecuador, Quito and Director of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance Studies (2014). In her editorial work, she co-edits the series Dissident Acts with Diana Taylor at Duke University Press, is Board Member of GLQ, and is a collective member of Social Text.
Macarena is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor. And, Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, as well as faculty member in the Brown Arts Institute.
Abraham Weil is a scholar of women, gender, and sexuality studies with a focus on radical political formations, anti-black racism, trans theorizing, and philosophy. Weil completed their Ph.D. in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Their work appears in Social Text, Critical Inquiry, The Black Scholar, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities.

Annika Yates is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her work explores how sports practices shape our understanding of what we consider to be nature or natural, with a focus on sport practice in Vietnam. She has published writing in such outlets as the Journal of Vietnam Studies and Mekong Review. She holds a Master’s degree in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in Philosophy from Mount Holyoke College. She is also a certified personal trainer and olympic-style weightlifting coach.