Imagining Trans of Color Justice: Interdisciplinary Approaches
The current moment for trans and gender nonconforming communities of color is one defined by shifts, transitions, and change. Just a few years after Laverne Cox graced the issue of Time Magazine claiming a “Transgender Tipping Point,” trans and gender nonconforming communities of color continue to face increasing rates of violence and marginalization. While the new administration introduces punitive policies, specifically surrounding access to public spaces, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people continue to take up space, through organizing, advocating for the movement of money and resources, and taking on positions of leadership in key institutions. This paradoxical position necessitates further examination, particularly of the strategies that trans and gender nonconforming people of color take up to resist and persevere in this current moment.
This panel takes an interdisciplinary approach to the work of resistance, resilience, and, ultimately, “justice,” among trans people, particularly people of color. What does it look like for organizers, activists, and cultural producers to imagine trans of color justice? What about for institutional actors, i.e., nonprofit staff, funders, business executives, and service providers, who might navigate through different structural restrictions and expectations? How do trans and gender nonconforming people of color in any of these contexts combat racialized and gendered subjugation they face in both overt and insidious ways? This panel seeks explorations of these questions from different methodological and theoretical approaches, including but not limited to those using ethnographic, linguistic, visual culture, textual analysis, and archival lenses. Possible topics might include the following:
● What does “trans justice” mean for communities of color? What does it look like to imagine and work toward these visions of trans (of color) justice?
● How are notions of “community” for trans and gender nonconforming people of color mobilized to the detriment and benefit of “trans of color justice”?
● What are the theoretical, political, and methodological implications of “trans of color” as an analytic?
● How do trans and gender nonconforming people of color strategically navigate institutional contexts in order to resist the “administrative violence” (a la Dean Spade) inherent in these institutions?
● What kinds of cultural production(s) can and do imagine justice for trans and gender nonconforming people of color?
● What theoretical framework(s) are most productive for engaging questions of trans (of color) justice?
● How do trans and gender nonconforming activists, advocates, and community leaders of color define and envision “justice” in their work?
● What is the relationship between trans visibility and trans justice?
Please submit an abstract (150-200 words) for this panel to panel organizer, V Varun Chaudhry (Northwestern University), vvarunchaudhry@gmail.com by Friday, February 16 .