Sensationally Trans: Fleshing out Trans of Color Method, Materiality, and Performance

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Racialized transness is sensational. In the contexts of late-stage empire, our lives are abhorrent to public socio-political gaze and anti-trans violence feels ubiquitous. As trans of color subjects traverse racial, gendered, and sexual transgressions, negotiating abject and agentive subjectivity, trans of color embodiment, methods, and performance often live in sites of sensation and sensorial excess, giving rise to sensation as trans methodology. Underscored by scholars like Jillian Hernandez, Amber Jamilla Musser, Francisco J. Galarte, L.H. Stallings, and Jian Neo Chen, queer/trans of color aesthetics and embodiment linger in the affect and sensation of the meaning-making process of performance. As trans of color subjects embody what Hernandez terms "aesthetic excess," it is no coincidence that we bear the crisis of empire and threaten the very constitution of the nation-state mediated by the necropolitical management of gender. Our errant existences, as C. Riley Snorton (building on Hortense Spillers) makes explicit, emerge from the originary racialized violence of chattel slavery, which saw the ungendering of captive Black flesh. Embodying the dynamically nuanced experiences of a sensorial and aesthetic excess, trans of color subjects are routinely targets of transmisogyny, colonial violence, sexual commodification, the carceral state, medical violence, and other modes of disciplinary punishment. Yet we survive, morph, and transcend these iterations of empire and attempts at capture and annihilation.

Culminating in “Sensationally Trans,” this roundtable, composed of transdisciplinary scholars of critical gender, ethnic, visual culture, literary, performance, and sound studies, seeks to play with and negotiate trans of color critique, method, and performance. Understood as method, sensation facilitates our proximities, relationalities, and orientations to trans as a category of difference and transness as a mode of enfleshment. We ask: how is sense activated across, through, and between these conjugations and constellations of racialized transness? Together, we pay critical attention to material histories of racialized transness while also indulging in the speculative play of carnal desire. Fleshing out trans of color critique, materiality, and performance requires scraping up the affective residues of race, sex, and ability and dreaming sensationally differently. A collective response to totalized structures of domination, we aim to feel through trans of color felt life and how it sustains itself through capacious and often contradictory sites of racialized, gendered, and sexual transgressions––deployed through sensorial knowledge productions, reframing the realm of sensation and enfleshment as that which is produced by violence but not necessarily incorporable by it, oscillating between moments of abjection and self-production across fleeting spatio-temporalities.

Even under the ongoing duresses of late-stage empire, trans of color life and performance forge worlds outside and beyond our current terms of order, threatening the constitution of our very subjectivities––malleable, shapeshifting, and ungovernable. We respond to the American Studies Association conference call by centering trans sensation as a method of doing critical trans studies, critical gender studies, critical ethnic studies, and critical American Studies otherwise and by treating racial trans sensation as a creative ground for new intellectual and political possibilities.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Eric Stanley, University of California Berkeley

Panelists

• Stef Torralba, Grinnell College

• Istifaa Ahmed, Brown University

• Alejandrina M Medina, University of California-San Diego

• Lau Malaver, St. Olaf College

Biographical Information

Eric A. Stanley is the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory. Eric’s first manuscript Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke 2021) argues racialized anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to, and not an aberration of, western modernity. Atmospheres of Violence was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from CLAGS. Eric is currently working on two other projects, the first is a study of nonsovereignty and radical hospitality through the ephemera of trans/queer insurgents organizing underground in the 1970s and 1980s. They are also starting a new project on architectures of attack and trans sociality, focusing on the Bay Area.

stef torralba (they/them) is Assistant Professor of English and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell College. Their pedagogy centers the intellectual lessons of queer studies; trans studies; queer and trans of color critique; crip and mad studies; critical and comparative race and ethnic studies; Asian American Studies; U.S. Latinx Studies; and transnational and decolonial Trans/Feminisms of Color. Their research focuses on queer, trans, and mad of color aesthetics in contemporary literature; performance; and film, media, and visual culture. Their current book project, Feeling Close: Queer/Trans Migrant Aesthetics, theorizes “closeness” as a quotidian sensation, affect, and aesthetic that opens up otherwise possibilities for decolonial thinking and cross-ethnic relationality in 21st-century film, literary, and performance works about Filipinx, Latinx, and Indigenous undocumented migrants. Their scholarly work appears or is forthcoming in Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies, Pacific Coast Philology, the forthcoming edited collection Beyond the X: Queer and Trans Filipinx Studies, and liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (where they also guest co-edited a special issue on Black queer musical cinemas titled “Black and Queer, Music on Screen”). They hold a Ph.D. in English with a designated emphasis in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of California, Riverside. Before Grinnell, they were Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Pomona College, where they also created and taught new courses for the Gender and Women’s Studies, American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Chicanx/Latinx Studies programs.

Lau Malaver [they/them] is an Assistant Professor of Race, Ethnic, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at St. Olaf College. Malaver's research project, Recovecos: Race, Time, and the Performance of Trans Embodiment, investigates 21st century trans and queer cultural productions in the Américas through the theoretical framework they term Recovecos (Spanish for nooks, hidden turns, twists) which is the relationship of space and time. Malaver is on the Editorial Board of Transgender Studies Quarterly, and has published in ASAP/J: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Journal, Chiricu Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, Ecumenica: Journal of Performance and Religion, among others. Malaver has received recognition for their performance work at the Denver Art Museum, through a creative residency with B2 Center for Art, Media, and Performance, and as a working group facilitator with the New York University Institute of Performance and Politics. Lau is also a fiction writer.

Alejandrina M. Medina is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, San Diego. She is also co-lead of the Black, Indigenous, and Trans of Color Histories Lab, which has recently been awarded a $460,000 higher learning grant from the Mellon Foundation. Alejandrina’s dissertation project, “Latina Loudness: Transfeminine Excess in the Americas” examines forms of excess in contemporary transfeminine aesthetic production. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, NACLA: Report on the Americas, and Contemporary Music Review.

Istifaa Ahmed is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Istifaa’s research looks to queer/trans of color performance, aesthetics, and speculative fictions for its disruption of colonial and transatlantic violence. Their work draws largely from queer of color critique, Black feminisms, women of color feminisms, performance studies, and queer inhumanisms. They consider what it means to be (in)human, erotic reconfigurations of being, and fugitive practice. Istifaa is thinking with the concept of porosity, as the space in between matter, to think through the permeability and in-between-ness across sites such as flesh, disease, conspiracy, and apocalypse as inhabitations and praxis of queer/trans of color life and precarity. Istifaa is also a filmmaker/artist and pursues collaborative and movement-based projects that center creative and sensorial modes of knowledge production.