Rethinking Transgender Scholarship: Critical Trans Organizing in Higher Education

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

How does the emergence of critical transgender studies affect the everyday lives of trans students? Following the inauguration of Donald Trump, transgender youth are exceptionally at risk of both epistemological and physical violences throughout the United States. This panel will generate discourse and share research on the contemporary narratives of dissent of young trans people within higher education as it pertains to transgender activism, neoliberalism, and liberation. The four panelists - coming from a variety of backgrounds and geographies as transgender scholars and activists - will discuss multifarious topics pertaining to organizing in the academy as it relates to ongoing conflicts within and outside of the trans community. This panel seeks to bridge academic narratives of transness with those of organizing, theory, and dissent.
In 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the Justice Department was suing North Carolina and the University of North Carolina over The Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act (HB2), which required trans people use restrooms that correspond with their birth certificates. Activists and media took note, praising the decision, and broadcasting Lynch’s speech that espoused the liberal ideals of equality and inclusion to millions. The vital point where transgender people are presumably protected under the law is one in which the community loses its radical histories of dissent. Lynch’s strategy - while providing trans people in North Carolina restroom access - was also one of saviorship and assimilation, granting further state sovereignty over transgender subjecthood.
This panel asks: How do we counteract state violence while also gaining access to appropriate programs and facilities? What are the consequences of inclusivity when a fascist regime controls legislation and extends the newfound (and welcomed) sovereignty over transness to direct violence? We can expand this discussion of transgender dissent in education to the necropolitical - questioning how activisms within and surrounding the academy increasingly posit transness as a formation of death. Under the façade of inclusion and preventing death, surplus value is extracted from trans bodies within the academy through institutional and interpersonal violences. The capitalization upon death appears in many areas of the academy, from Transgender Day of Remembrance vigils to safe zone trainings, where the rhetoric of inclusivity allows cisgender people to claim ownership over trans narratives and pedagogies for social capital while also espousing liberal cisgender ideals of normalization and assimilation. Inclusivity trainings reify the epistemological methodologies of denying transgender agency, limiting transness to iterations of subjecthood produced through colonialist interplays.
How can we counteract these modalities of transphobia through transgender studies? As the central question of this panel, each presenter will provide unique interdisciplinary insight into the contemporary state of trans studies and dissent within the academy. Transgender studies may not only change the way trans people interact with academia but also reimagine numerous epistemologies. Intervention, opposition, and lived experience have been centralized within transgender studies since its inception. We seek to elucidate the relationship between trans theory and multidisciplinary analysis including philosophy, history, and surveillance studies to problematize assimilation and illustrate a future of transgender liberation.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Toby Beauchamp, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Individual Presentations

• Death in the Academy: Transgender Necropolitics, Commodity, and Higher Education - Eli Erlick, University of California, Santa Cruz

• The Costs of Safety: Negotiating the Role of the Neoliberal Subject in LGBTQIA+ Inclusivity Training - Mel L Ferrara, University of Arizona

• Trans Bodies of Knowledge: Critical Pedagogy, Doing Philosophy, and Collective Agency - Sage Perdue, University of California, Merced

• Access Without Inclusion: Loretta Lynch, Transgender Dissent, and Pedagogies of Resistance - Lily Zacharias, Bard College