Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910069
Omi Salas-SantaCruz
Abstract: The author reflects on the experiences of teaching a Trans* Latinx studies course, where students initially expressed discontent with the syllabus for lacking legible trans subjects. By engaging with decolonial methodologies and theories, the author highlights the limitations of “looking for” (Lugones 2020) trans in traditional archives and theories. The author discusses the importance of embracing the nonsense within the pluriverse of affective belonging and recognizing the possibilities that emerge within the nonsensical and nonbinary theoretical subjectivities that challenge conventional understandings of transgender phenomena. Engaging with U.S. women of color feminist theorizing—rooted in Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and decolonial feminisms—the author discusses the importance of nonbinary thinking practices in confronting the epistemology of ignorance in trans studies. Drawing upon the works of various decolonial and trans* of color scholars, this paper explores the complex diasporic relationality of jotería as a way of existing within coloniality, offering a critical lens to examine the diverse dimensions of queer and trans Latinx life. Nonbinary thinking, in this context, is essential for learning from, alongside, and within oppressed trans of color knowledge, theories, strategies, and ways of existing grounded in particular cosmologies, geographies, histories, and cultures. It also represents a vital political strategy for avoiding and refusing discursive colonization.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910073
Beshouy Botros
Abstract:In 1958, the popular Egyptian magazine Ākhir Sā`ah ran a story about four people designated “men donning dresses and living as women” in the Upper Egyptian town of Asyut. Ākhir Sā`ah presented brief profiles explaining these people’s gender expression alongside staged photographs and opinions from an Egyptian psychiatrist, the local minister of education, a lawyer, and a social scientist. This article departs from that one. By annotating my trans*lation of the Arabic text, I interrupt its binary logics. Trans*lation is an idiomatic meaning-making process that is in intimate dialogue with the process of transition itself. In the source text, Egyptians living in tension with the gender binary were made legible through the relay of pseudoscientific evidence and details about their early childhood experiences, or in one instance, through a story about a deal between the subject and a spirit, a jinn. My analysis denaturalizes the publication’s ethnographic documentation and teleological narration of these people’s lives. Working through the Arabic text and departing from the Orientalist fixation with philology, I consider the possibilities of rendering gender alterity across languages and employ trans*lation as a method to engage narratological and historiographical processes. In my treatment of these biographies, I clarify how “nonbinary” challenges the emplotment of gender transition and the work of translation as linear processes, and I motion towards its potential to evacuate the overlapping transitions to modernity and the emergence of the postcolonial nation-state, which the aforementioned transfeminine individuals also lived, from similarly teleological narrations and binary logics. Ultimately, I situate these four subjects beyond the interlocking binaries of man/woman, human/spirit, cis/trans, modern/traditional, and East/West. In so doing, I collapse these structures and offer alternative portraits of transfemininity in Asyut.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910072
Maya von Ziegesar
You entice me with but one of your eyes Maya von Ziegesar (bio) You entice me with but one of your eyes is named for a verse from Song of Songs and modeled after the Ain Sakhri figurine, also known as the Ain Sakhri Lovers. The Ain Sakhri figurine is the first artistic portrayal of sex, between two embracing, genderless figures. The sculpture also depicts ambiguous sex organs depending on the angle from which it is viewed. It was carved eleven thousand years ago in what is now Palestine. It was discovered by a Bedouin, whose name was not recorded, and identified to be of immense historical importance by a French archeologist. In 1958 Sotheby’s sold the Lovers to the British Museum, where they remain to this day. The cave in which the Lovers were discovered sits in an Area C zone of the occupied West Bank, halfway between Ramallah and Tel Aviv. The Israeli state has a massive interest in excavating and exploring sites of biblical significance in order to emphasize Jewish history and their claim to the land. Archeological sites from before and after the biblical period serve no nation-building purpose and are therefore often overlooked. In 2012 Israel built a road above Ain Sakhri Cave and now pays a small fee to the occupied Palestinians for the right to dump trash into the valley below. You entice me with but one of your eyes is made of plaster gauze and string. Both are medical materials, evoking conflict, rupture, and repair. I made the piece after an extended educational trip to the West Bank and most particularly as a response to Avi Mograbi’s documentary Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. Mograbi uses this biblical verse (Judges 16:28) as a guiding lens to understand mutually destructive impulses in the Arab-Israeli conflict. I try to reimagine the liminal space of occupied Palestine through a verse from Song of Songs (Song of Songs 4:9) and through an acknowledgment [End Page 130] of the land’s continuous history, which predates monotheistic religion and dualistic conflict. The Ain Sakhri figurine is a piece of this new historical narrative. Click for larger view View full resolution Maya von Ziegesar. You entice me with but one of your eyes, 2019. Plaster gauze, string. [End Page 131] Maya von Ziegesar Maya von Ziegesar is a sculptor and philosophy PhD student from New York City. Her philosophical work explores coloniality, ideology, and practices of epistemic resistance, especially in Asian diasporic communities. Her artwork explores surface, volume, and skin. Before starting her PhD studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, she worked at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, taught English in South Korea, and got a degree in philosophy and visual art from Princeton University. She can be reached at mvonziegesar@gradcenter.cuny.edu. Works Cited Boyd, Brian and Jill Cook. 1993. “A Reconsideration of the ‘Ain Sakhri’ Figurine.” In Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 59: 399–405. Google Scholar Boyd, Brian, Hamed Salem, and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.
{"title":"You entice me with but one of your eyes","authors":"Maya von Ziegesar","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910072","url":null,"abstract":"You entice me with but one of your eyes Maya von Ziegesar (bio) You entice me with but one of your eyes is named for a verse from Song of Songs and modeled after the Ain Sakhri figurine, also known as the Ain Sakhri Lovers. The Ain Sakhri figurine is the first artistic portrayal of sex, between two embracing, genderless figures. The sculpture also depicts ambiguous sex organs depending on the angle from which it is viewed. It was carved eleven thousand years ago in what is now Palestine. It was discovered by a Bedouin, whose name was not recorded, and identified to be of immense historical importance by a French archeologist. In 1958 Sotheby’s sold the Lovers to the British Museum, where they remain to this day. The cave in which the Lovers were discovered sits in an Area C zone of the occupied West Bank, halfway between Ramallah and Tel Aviv. The Israeli state has a massive interest in excavating and exploring sites of biblical significance in order to emphasize Jewish history and their claim to the land. Archeological sites from before and after the biblical period serve no nation-building purpose and are therefore often overlooked. In 2012 Israel built a road above Ain Sakhri Cave and now pays a small fee to the occupied Palestinians for the right to dump trash into the valley below. You entice me with but one of your eyes is made of plaster gauze and string. Both are medical materials, evoking conflict, rupture, and repair. I made the piece after an extended educational trip to the West Bank and most particularly as a response to Avi Mograbi’s documentary Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. Mograbi uses this biblical verse (Judges 16:28) as a guiding lens to understand mutually destructive impulses in the Arab-Israeli conflict. I try to reimagine the liminal space of occupied Palestine through a verse from Song of Songs (Song of Songs 4:9) and through an acknowledgment [End Page 130] of the land’s continuous history, which predates monotheistic religion and dualistic conflict. The Ain Sakhri figurine is a piece of this new historical narrative. Click for larger view View full resolution Maya von Ziegesar. You entice me with but one of your eyes, 2019. Plaster gauze, string. [End Page 131] Maya von Ziegesar Maya von Ziegesar is a sculptor and philosophy PhD student from New York City. Her philosophical work explores coloniality, ideology, and practices of epistemic resistance, especially in Asian diasporic communities. Her artwork explores surface, volume, and skin. Before starting her PhD studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, she worked at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, taught English in South Korea, and got a degree in philosophy and visual art from Princeton University. She can be reached at mvonziegesar@gradcenter.cuny.edu. Works Cited Boyd, Brian and Jill Cook. 1993. “A Reconsideration of the ‘Ain Sakhri’ Figurine.” In Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 59: 399–405. Google Scholar Boyd, Brian, Hamed Salem, and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910065
J. Logan Smilges
Abstract: The category of nonbinary has entered a new season. No longer emergent but maturing, it is facing new, pressing questions about what the term means, who it is for, in what ways it can be mobilized toward specific political agendas, and how it facilitates or impedes forms of community. In this essay, I unpack the anxieties that some trans and nonbinary people have expressed toward these questions and that are sometimes invoked to cast doubt on the politics or ethics of nonbinary . Rather than accept or reject these anxieties at face value, I re-story them to honor their sources while yet insisting on a path forward for nonbinary , a path that depends not on how we define it but on how we occupy it. By allegorizing the anxieties in nonbinary and neurodivergent communities, I propose that the language of access needs and disability impacts may provide models for negotiating accountability and care in pursuit of trans justice.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910095
Kay Ulanday Barrett
QPOC Conference Keynote: UCSB Originally written for May 15, 2015 Kay Ulanday Barrett (bio) I would like to thank QPOC Conference here at UCSB, the organizers, the students, the late nights and missing meals, the gas money and the delusion it takes to create social justice and critical and party space all in one dreamy QTBIPOClandia is a feat. If you get new ideas, get new crushes, have new protest chants, it’s because of those who’ve brought you here. Thank you to everyone who brought us here, the people who clean and care for this building, the earth that feeds us, the native and indigenous, Two-Spirit communities whose land we are occupying, specifically the Chumash community. Gratitude to those who, like my mama, a motel worker, are globally exploited, forced migration, for this clean air, and my own witty remarks uninterrupted by military or police. #americandream? To honor those who brought me here, politically and spiritually: I want to uplift the femmes of color whose labor is deemed invisible. Y’all feed us, critique, protest, create this world, and you deserve the most high. I want to hold the trans femme women of color who raised me, whose politics are true salve but aren’t booked to many conferences unless they are super fancy and look a kind of way that makes us comfortable on realness or womanhood. For Bamby Salcedo and for my Tita Alby who did my makeup and made sure I was fed, made me do my homework as she got ready for beauty pageants and flagrant cop searches. I am thankful to my Sick and Disabled Trans and Queer People of Color who lead movements even when they are abandoned or have to be kept in secret to be considered “functional,” who cannot afford travel, aren’t given the space to travel, you deserve to be here. I do this work for you and for this universe we build to believe that all bodies are valid. All bodies are intrinsic to building a future. [End Page 292] Let’s begin with this: Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary, it’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? —Janet Mock Fifteen Plus Things I Wish I Knew in College as a Poor-Ass QTPOC from an Immigrant Household (the REMIX) Originally performed at University of California, Santa Barbara, for the Queer People of Color Conference 15. fuck the word “uppity.” you do not have to choose any community over the other, academic, of color, queer, chronically ill, political, mixed, poor, refugee, transgender, from the hood. if possible, embrace and let them all live, inform, and complicate one another. You are beyond formula or standardized confines. 14. odds are you will be forced to study mostly white, straight, skinny, cisgender, european/anglo, possibly rich people’s discourse. read it to read it, to unlearn it. I know it is so boring. find the work that really calls your skill and passions. As Calloutqueen, trans femme of color mark aguhar said: “LOL Reverse Racism.” 14.5 when a friend of privilege calls you or intros you as
{"title":"QPOC Conference Keynote: UCSB","authors":"Kay Ulanday Barrett","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910095","url":null,"abstract":"QPOC Conference Keynote: UCSB Originally written for May 15, 2015 Kay Ulanday Barrett (bio) I would like to thank QPOC Conference here at UCSB, the organizers, the students, the late nights and missing meals, the gas money and the delusion it takes to create social justice and critical and party space all in one dreamy QTBIPOClandia is a feat. If you get new ideas, get new crushes, have new protest chants, it’s because of those who’ve brought you here. Thank you to everyone who brought us here, the people who clean and care for this building, the earth that feeds us, the native and indigenous, Two-Spirit communities whose land we are occupying, specifically the Chumash community. Gratitude to those who, like my mama, a motel worker, are globally exploited, forced migration, for this clean air, and my own witty remarks uninterrupted by military or police. #americandream? To honor those who brought me here, politically and spiritually: I want to uplift the femmes of color whose labor is deemed invisible. Y’all feed us, critique, protest, create this world, and you deserve the most high. I want to hold the trans femme women of color who raised me, whose politics are true salve but aren’t booked to many conferences unless they are super fancy and look a kind of way that makes us comfortable on realness or womanhood. For Bamby Salcedo and for my Tita Alby who did my makeup and made sure I was fed, made me do my homework as she got ready for beauty pageants and flagrant cop searches. I am thankful to my Sick and Disabled Trans and Queer People of Color who lead movements even when they are abandoned or have to be kept in secret to be considered “functional,” who cannot afford travel, aren’t given the space to travel, you deserve to be here. I do this work for you and for this universe we build to believe that all bodies are valid. All bodies are intrinsic to building a future. [End Page 292] Let’s begin with this: Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary, it’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? —Janet Mock Fifteen Plus Things I Wish I Knew in College as a Poor-Ass QTPOC from an Immigrant Household (the REMIX) Originally performed at University of California, Santa Barbara, for the Queer People of Color Conference 15. fuck the word “uppity.” you do not have to choose any community over the other, academic, of color, queer, chronically ill, political, mixed, poor, refugee, transgender, from the hood. if possible, embrace and let them all live, inform, and complicate one another. You are beyond formula or standardized confines. 14. odds are you will be forced to study mostly white, straight, skinny, cisgender, european/anglo, possibly rich people’s discourse. read it to read it, to unlearn it. I know it is so boring. find the work that really calls your skill and passions. As Calloutqueen, trans femme of color mark aguhar said: “LOL Reverse Racism.” 14.5 when a friend of privilege calls you or intros you as ","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: This article brings together four educators to collaboratively discuss how nonbinary representations and narratives circulate through education, especially in biology education in the context of Chile. This discussion is illustrated with an experience that began in August 2020 with a master’s course and continued with the practice of teaching biology to students in a school science classroom and to teachers-to-be at the university, both with a focus on the natural, the human, and the nonbinary features of the nonhuman. Finally, the implications of these experiences for our practice and a broader context of teaching biology are discussed.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910078
Gizem Senturk
Abstract: This article explores the symbiotic relationship of the Trill species in Star Trek from nonbinary, trans*, and queer ecological perspectives. The Trill’s unique physiology allows them to enter into a symbiotic relationship with a symbiont, leading to nonheterosexual, nonbinary, and androgynous features. By examining the trans metaphor represented by Jadzia Dax, a Trill character in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , the article highlights the ways in which the Trill challenge traditional notions of gender, biology, and symbiosis by introducing queerness. Furthermore, the article argues that symbiosis, when viewed through the lens of queer ecology, posthumanism, and more-than-humanisms, reveals that all living beings engage in queering, emphasizing the interconnectedness of life and the absence of living without symbiosis.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910084
Jack Jen Gieseking
Generations of Ex-lovers Cannot Fail: Rethinking Lesbian Feminism Today Jack Jen Gieseking (bio) Cait McKinney’s Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020 Rox Samer’s Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022 Executive Director Sarah Chinn of the (then) Center of Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS)1 co-organized the Lesbians in the 1970s conference in 2010 to “commemorate, celebrate, and evaluate the diverse contributions of lesbians over the course of the 1970s” (Chinn 2011). In her CLAGSNews newsletter retrospective, Chinn delightedly records that hopeful estimates for 250 registrants were surpassed with 450 attendees(!) “filling the halls of the [CUNY] Graduate Center with more lesbians than the building has ever seen and most likely ever will see!” She adds how exciting it was that paper proposals “came from younger women (and a couple of men), who were engaging lesbian experiences in the 1970s as meaningful topics for academic study and political analysis.” Over a decade later, academic work about 1970s lesbian feminism has finally begun to accumulate—by an ever more diversely gendered authorship—including the publication of two central, insightful texts: Cait McKinney’s Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies and Rox Samer’s Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s. These books fit together; they are complementary texts. Both argue against limiting notions of lesbian feminism as any fixed, certain framework or as defined by any one group of people. Both authors write against any claim to lesbian feminism by trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). Instead, lesbian feminism is multitudinous and malleable—in fact, what is lesbian (or the 1970s-style of capitalized Lesbian) is still being constructed and will be constructed again. Both books draw on new archives and texts and rethink previously studied materials in important ways, and both are packed with readable, powerful prose from which to rethink, reimagine, write, and teach about lesbians in the 1970s. While the authors do bring in [End Page 249] race and disability and provide significant theorizing around both concepts, the most significant shared weakness is the uneven attention both books pay to these positionalities, whereby some areas are stronger than others. Published in 2020, McKinney’s Information Activism, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, does the profound work of turning lesbian information-making and -sharing into an utterly invigorating read. The book’s principal concept, “information activism,” is the work of “women who responded to their frustrated desire for information about lesbian history and lesbian life by generating that information themselves” and thus produced “how movement-related information is stored, sorted, searched for, and retrieved by lesbian-feminist activists serving communities they car
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910062
Shereen Inayatulla, Andie Silva
Editors’ Note Shereen Inayatulla and Andie Silva We are delighted to witness the publication of this special issue, Nonbinary, at the beginning of our term as WSQ general editors. The urgency and timeliness of this issue cannot be overstated. We are living in a moment of deep polarization, distrust, and grief; every day we experience deliberate attacks and laws against trans, nonbinary, and LGBTQIA+ communities, and must re-energize our fight against oppression by building coalitions. At the same time, we observe a flourishing of identities and the rise of generations committed to self-expression beyond binaries. This special issue emerges from these material conditions and offers paths to engage with, apply, and celebrate nonbinary plurality without reifying a monolithic experience limited to one single concern. We want to thank all of the contributors whose capacious definitions of and approaches to nonbinary experiences showcase the intellectual, educational, artistic, and personal benefits to thinking and thriving outside rigid binary structures. As the contributions in this volume attest, nonbinary thinking can invite us to not only challenge polarization but also find moments of community and make space for hope and joy. Nonbinary perspectives encourage us to push back against an either/or framework; against borders used to police land, bodies, and scholarly disciplines; and against settler-colonial violences that impose a false sense of normativity that is weaponized to uphold dominant power structures. As Marquis Bey brilliantly explores in this issue’s Alerts and Provocations section, nonbinary is also not neutral: nonbinary resists pressures to choose between oppressive modes of being and refuses the imposition of gender as a static category that must shape one’s life. [End Page 11] It is thrilling to observe how the pieces included in this special issue, chosen long before our term began, connect with our vision as coeditors: to amplify the work of practitioners at the helm of gender justice movements and centralize those who are queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The contributions here exemplify the ways scholarship can embrace multiplicity and reject historically sanctioned divisions between so-called academic and popular genres, conventions, or forms of expression. The deliberate mingling of articles, art, poetry, presentations, and the like offers a richer, more layered conversation. A million thanks to the guest editors of Nonbinary, Red Washburn and JV Fuqua, for their care and dedication in ushering this issue into existence. Their efforts in preparing and editing this issue are immeasurable. Profound gratitude to the team of creative editors, whose attentiveness to the poetry, prose, and visual art bring depth and dimensionality to this issue. We are grateful to the Feminist Press for oversight on the production and distribution of this journal, especially editorial director Lauren Rosema
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