Transfeminist Bondings with Indigenous and Black Knowledges
This panel centers transfeminist dialogues with Indigenous and Black forms of subversion. It considers criminality, land protection, immigration, spirituality, and anti-state organizing.
Sayak Valencia (Colegio de la Frontera Norte)
“Transfeminist theory for the analysis of male violence and the nonviolent reconstruction of the social fabric in contemporary Mexico”
I start from the transfeminist perspective which is understood as an articulation of both thought and social resistance that is able to integrate mobility between genders, corporalities and sexualities with the assumptions of feminist struggles to build alliances with non-hegemonic masculinities in order to create an reticulated organization implacable to the opposition between genders. We create a brief genealogy of what is meant by transfeminisms in different contexts for answering the questions: What kind of subjects and practices does the extreme sexist reinterpretation of neoliberalism create and what are its most evident social implications in Mexico?, how can transfeminism redirect and propose other models to create individuals who are not related to the dystopia of gore capitalism, nor hegemonic masculinity, or the neoliberal hyper-consumerism?
Keywords: transfeminism; dissent; capitalismo gore (gore capitalism); subjetividad endriaga (endriaga subjectivity); decolonialism
Marquis Bey (Northwestern University)
“The Black of Trans Feminism, the Trans of Black Feminism”
In light of my recently published monograph, Black Trans Feminism, I hope to provide further insight into the relationship between trans feminism and black feminism. Often the two are believed to be separate, distinct traditions in the lineage of feminism, concerned with different demographics—trans women and black women, respectively. But I aim to articulate the two as much more imbricated than believed; indeed, I aim to demonstrate the ways that black feminism has as its fundamental aim a rearticulation, if not vitiation, of normative gender itself and is thus a deeply trans theorization. Similarly, trans feminism, with its emphasis on bodily autonomy on the one hand and notation of one of gender's violences as affixed to its racialization on the other hand—not to mention trans feminism's attempt to call out and undermine the harms of gender as such—becomes clearly indebted to and an iteration of radical black feminism. Thus, this talk will showcase the necessity of thinking the two together, and thinking them in service of gender's, which is to say racialized gender's, obliteration.
Subverting the Coloniality of Vision: Mapuche Post-Pornographies in Chile
Mathilda Shepard
Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University
To what extent can post-porn as method question other “economies of otherness,” such as the ethnographic gaze that (like pornography) promises “the ultimate pleasure of knowing the Other” (Nichols)? What are the implications of reading decolonial acts of sexual dissidence as post-pornographies and reading post-porn through the lens of decolonial theory? This paper considers these questions by examining the possibilities and limitations of post-pornography to forge transfeminist bondings with Black and Indigenous knowledges. Focusing on the case of Chile, it places four works by members of the Mapuche feminist collective Rangiñtulewfü—Daniela Catrileo’s short-story collection Piñen, Paula Coñoepan’s sculpture La vagina es la matriz and Paula Baeza Pailamilla’s video-performances Wüfko and Wedkel—in conversation with writings and performances by Chilean post-porn artists Katia Sepúlveda, MariaBasura and Jorge Benavides. I argue that by rooting their subversions of pornographic and ethnographic vision in notions of champurria (mixed/impure) subjectivity and corporeal relationality with itrofill mogen (all living beings), Rangiñtulewfü members articulate queer ecologies of desire that reveal and respond to lacunae in the post-porn movement’s engagement with decolonial questions.