by Rowan Kairos Looney
“Most people think of ideas as fixed ideas. But ideas have their power because they’re not fixed, that once they become fixed, they’re already dead.” -philosopher Grace Lee Boggs, American Revolutionary
First, trans life destabilizes gender rigidity. The existence of trans people threatens seemingly essential binaries. Second, we must resist institutional pressures to stabilize trans. Codifying trans generates new archetypes, not possibilities. Third, the practice of destabilizing trans forms a pedagogy better suited (than stability) to index transgender mutability. We practice attunement to trans. These tenets ground a pedagogy I introduced in a new class, Trans Identity and/as Performance, that I developed and co-taught with Dr. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez in Spring 2022. We experimented together – the students, myself, and Dr. Paul as grading TA and my external mentor – to great success.
In the spirit of social theorist Patricia Hill Collins’ call to challenge “dominant knowledge validation processes,” I gathered course material by and for trans artists to form an alternative epistemology. We drew on writer Paul Preciado’s autoethnographic TestoJunkie to make legible the capitalist, biopolitical regime profiting from gender medicalization. We read performance artist Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi’s choreodrama, For Black Trans Girls Who Gotta Cuss a Motherf****** Out as an experiment in t4t worldmaking despite a pervasive necro- and biopolitical periphery. We looked to animator/artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s video game Resurrection Lands, which tests audience agency in perceived private space, especially related to trans tourism, to assess the role of speculative fiction in countering historic erasure. We watched Paris is Burning to learn how integral – and uncited – the artistic work of Black and brown queer people is to today’s queer and trans digital culture. We listened to the New York City Trans Oral History Project interview with activist René Imperato, to learn the elemental prevalence of active anti-fascism in trans liberation movements. We watched musician p1nkstar perform at the Capitol and engaged with excerpts from Girls Like Us to understand the liberatory power of the spectacular. We engaged with choreographer Jamal Milan’s oldway vogue workshop to discuss the consequences of academic conventions for written archives. We read playwright Phillip Dawkins’ full-length Charm to navigate conversations about permission and collaboration with living elders, such as Miss Gloria Allen. To resist stabilizing trans as a unilateral aesthetic or experience, the course wove together course materials that contradicted each other in politic and style.
Trans, a destabilization
Philosopher Judith Butler theorizes gender as a constitution of signs constantly being registered and recognized – “always a doing.” Building on Butler, I do not define trans as a reconstitution of signs. Historian Susan Stryker teaches me to think of transgender as “the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place.” Joining Butler and Stryker, I posit trans as a point of departure from (as)sign(ed) constitution. I move onward with scholar C. Riley Snorton’s theory of trans as “a movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival.” I learn from Snorton to think of trans as a collective pattern, not a distillation of individual anomaly. Invoking Butler, Stryker, and Snorton, I release the necessity of arrival or trajectory and trouble the signs we use to constitute an origin. I can open the shape of trans to be more of a locus, a multiplicity.
Institutionalization begets stability
In leading the curriculum content development for the course, I pointedly rejected the dominant impulse to medicalize trans. On the first day of class, a psychology student confessed they wanted to know why are people transgender? To her question, I offered sound artist Xandra Metcalfe’s paradigm-shifting question, “why are there so many cissexual people?” Pathologizing transgenderism removes gender plurality from cultural context, which, consequently, theorizes trans as a subaltern experience to be evaluated separately from racialization; “but gender always lives in the idiom of race (to say nothing of disability, sexuality, class, and so on),” as artist/activist Tourmaline reminds us. Thinking otherwise is an assimilationist impulse Susan Stryker cheekily dubs “the whiteness of transness.” In destabilizing trans, and in witnessing how trans destabilizes (domino-style, opening up imaginaries-made-real such as racialization), I sought to interrogate power differentials within global gender plurality and position any analysis of what Butler calls “culturally established lines of coherence” as one of decoloniality.
Destabilization, a pedagogy
The class co-constructed a practice of indexing mutability, which forms the pedagogy of destabilization. I learned from the editors of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility “to facilitate an open network of resonances and to allow through-lines to emerge among the texts.” Drawing on feminist co-constructivism and Black feminist alternative epistemologies, the course pedagogy relied on collective inquiry to conceptualize trans as a way of knowing, a restless mutability that can teach us all how to live beyond our assignments. Four core course questions in the syllabus exemplify our ongoing inquiry:
- How have trans performers informed trans experience and contributed to a more nuanced understanding of gender(s), sexualities, and living?
- How do trans people, in the performance of our daily lives, reshape public culture in the very same way?
- How might we, from our different experiences, answer these questions with each other? What do you have to teach me? What might I share with you?
- How might our experience of informing each other shape our way forward in a world that struggles with trans identity on ahistorical and political terms?
My dream for trans studies is to develop a praxis for recognizing and learning from mutability – along the lines of what choreographer and educator Gesel Mason calls “practice-based evidences” over “evidence-based practices.” My words, however, are not available for contortion into permission to abstract trans from the material conditions and bodies of trans people, a dreadful reality as more and more academics hope to capitalize on the social currency of trans life amidst Snorton’s observed “rapid institutionalization of trans studies.” May the future of LGBTQ Studies emphasize the value and genius of transgender lives, before roses must be given.
Rowan Kairos Looney is an educator and theatermaker. They are based on unceded Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa and Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo lands. They are currently pursuing a PhD in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin.
