Trans of Color Critique

Catalog description

A history of transgender struggle has fomented intellectual formations that interrogate racial and gendered logics and proffer alternative structures of engagement, but commitment to any conceptualization of trans critique has often fallen back on assumptive ascriptions to non-racial analysis. Gathered at the concomitant study of race, gender, sexuality, class, and socio-spatiality, Trans of Color Critique provides an opportunity to (re)consider the analytical and material possibilities and tensions tendered by the articulation of transgender and non-white. Engaging with trans (and queer) of color theory as a particular approach to the political and as its own mode of knowledge production, we will not only take up the mutual constitution of race and gender, but center how whiteness has come to construct the burgeoning field of trans studies. In this graduate seminar we will consider the ways in which these multiply marginalized knowledges aim a critical challenge at our Western knowledge traditions. The course considers how race as a modality of analysis and trans of color critique as a praxis can in turn amplify, extend, and complicate the framework and analytical interventions offered by trans studies. Rather than attempt to be exhaustive, we will focus on the urgent interventions offered by trans of color critical theory, especially as it relates to foundational disruptions of Western epistemologies, medicalization, humanism, movement and displacement, decolonial critique, carcerality, violence and death, and futurity.