trans* social death: praxis of suspension
Trans* Social Death: Praxis of Suspension
Qualifying Exam Proposal
Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program
The Body: A Proposal
What is at stake when queer rituals and forms of cultural mourning intervene and disrupt closed structures of heteronormativity?
What does a creative intervention offer a queer archive of cultural memory underpinning trans* social death as a generative space of resilience?
How can trans* social death offer art praxis as a justice project of existence as resistance, to disseminate and translate knowledge of queer temporality, spatiality, and relationality?
The Bones:
In the Global North, death is often perceived by the heteronormative, cis white middle and upper classes as something ‘distanced’ in temporal, relational and material terms. Both global and local mechanisms of necropolitics subjugate life to the power of death (Mbembe, 2003) and exert their power over the lives and deaths of minoritized populations, making some deaths (and lives) more grievable than others (Butler 2004). With the ongoing rise of far-right political movements the world over, transgender culture offers a critical and timely ‘close reading’ of a living social death as part and parcel of reality—in deeply entrenched cultural ways—an affair intimately woven in the tissues of everyday trans* life.
Orlando Patterson offered a foundational sociological accounting of social death as the erasure of personhood within black slavery, referring to the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society (Patterson 1982). Naming complex modes of intrusive and extrusive social death, Patterson noted slaves are either conceived of as already outsiders and therefore as not belonging, or they are found not to belong and therefore are made outsiders (Zurn, 2020). Several scholars investigate the framing of social death within power structures of colonialism, operationalized through slavery (Patterson 1985), incarceration (Smith 2009), ghettos (Wacquant 2001), solitary confinement (Guenther 2013) and torture, terrorism, and genocide (Card 2010). While I draw heavily on the current scholarship of social death as one theoretical cornerstone to my project, none of the texts explicitly turn to trans* culture or offer a trans* reading of this phenomena.
Deploying an intermedia installation art praxis, Trans* Social Death: Praxis of Suspension is a transdisciplinary research-creation portfolio project situating a living archive of research on trans* social death as a generative space of suspension. I work with common objects and materials which have “died” through colonial abandonment (bone), neglect/ manipulation (wood/teeth/bullets/ feathers), or performative rejection (gendered objects; fishnet stockings) and have been reclaimed/recentred/ queered to create a context of complex affective meaning in conversation with the participant/viewer/spectator. Threading contexts of suspension, tension, and disruption, art sustains a powerful queer dialogue. This dialogue challenges dichotomous patterns of being, by creating a liminal space to disrupt those very patterns of being. A visual art practice is meant to address the academic confines and limitations of doing this work as a queer mode of creating/taking up space/visibility for the dissemination/transfer of knowledge.
Building on my Gender Studies MA research-creation exhibition projects, Distillation of Resilience: Female Masculinity in Form and Unsettling the Homestead: An Archive of Trans* Masculinity in Saskatchewan, I maintain visual art as a mode of trans* scholarship exploring the corporeality of gender fluidity. My research explores genderfluid resilience as generating life from living death through a process of disembodiment and re-embodiment. My art practice is a justice project seeking trans* liberation by a means of creating space and visibility for trans* identities to exist in a public archive. Relying on praxis intervention as a creative vehicle of participatory action research, my self-reflexive material practice theorizes forms of queer(ing) invisible grief elicited by the structural prescriptions of heteronormativity, always in conversation with The Other.
The Central Nervous System:
My identified fields are essential places to expand my knowledge and provide edges to my work. To facilitate a creative and scholarly work on trans* social death, I need to have a rigorous comprehension of three related fields of research: (1) trans* feminisms; (2) queer death studies; and (3) critical phenomenology. Crafting emergent fields with art praxis deeply entrenched my studies are interrelated in their obscurity. Ambivalent definitions and blurred borders offer key thinkers across all fields; Lorde, Ahmed, Salamon, Bettcher, and Butler are each determined to provide a common thread in feminisms of resistance.
Trans* Feminisms:
Trans* feminisms have been established as a transdisciplinary field of research that critically challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, and regimes of truths made evident by anti-trans feminist legacies of second wave feminism. These legacies have been carried forward by currencies of trans-exclusionary radical feminism (Bettcher and Stryker, 2016). Trans feminisms aim to resist and challenge the fixedness of gender that, as many of its supporters believe, traditional approaches to women's studies depend upon (Salamon, 2010).
Bettcher, Stryker, and Stone are primary thinkers who offer a crucial intervention into the systemic inequalities and geopolitical, social, and symbolic violence, exposing the differential vulnerabilities and invisibilities of trans* culture. Increasing socially and politically sanctioned violence against trans* people, particularly trans* people of colour, with the greatest threat to trans* women of colour, all contribute to continuously increasing mortality rates within transgender culture, despite, or because of transgender cultures concurrently increasing visibility. As Bettcher points out, we trans* people live an “everyday” shot through with perplexity, shot through with WTF questions. We live in the WTF (Bettcher, 2019). Responding to the urgency of what is at stake for trans* subjectivity, trans* feminisms consider the embodied experience of the speaking subject, who claims constative knowledge of the referent topic, to be a proper-indeed essential-component of the analysis of transgender phenomena (Stryker, 2006).
Queer Death Studies:
Aiming to redress issues of death, dying, and mourning in a queering, relentlessly norm-critical mode, queer death studies focus on contemporary forms of biopolitics (Chen, 2012) and necropolitics (Mbembe 2006); mechanisms of power that force certain bodies into liminal spaces between life and death. Drawing critical attention to discourses on death and mourning associated with heteronormative models of family bonds (Butler, 2004); and with norms for intergenerational and more-than-human relations (Haraway, 2016; Chen, 2012), queer death studies seek to unhinge certainties (Halberstam, 2011).
Framed within the power relations evident in both biopolitics (Chen, 2012) and necropolitics (Mbembe, 2006) that enact unjust modes of un/livable lives, queer death studies is tasked with troubling homonationalist (Puar, 2007), heteronormative (Rich, 1979) and cis-norm frames governing life through death, dying and mourning in contemporary western society. In weaving my approach to queer death studies, I am in conversation with social death thinkers (Patterson, Sexton, Wilderson, Guenther, Zern), thinkers of queer theory (Anzaldua, Lorde, Butler, Munoz, Rich), and texts which negotiate grief (Kristeva, Butler, Rich).
Critical Phenomenology:
A working definition of critical phenomenology is the suspension of the natural attitude in classical phenomenology, distilled with trans*/queer feminisms and critical/cultural theories, grounded in a dense first-person accounting of meaning-making and world-shaping. The action of disentangling threads can trace the efficacy of critical phenomenology in the context of trans* social death. The definition of a thread is a filament; a group of filaments twisted together, formed by spinning and twisting short textile fibres into a continuous strand. A thread can function in tension, suspension, or disruption to stitch, weave or embed. Critical phenomenology provides a reprieve from the bounds of heteronormativity by both a means and method of reserving the threads of heteronormativity to explore the queer-trans* temporality living (and dying) in suspension between those threads.
I am critically engaged with Merleau-Ponty's foundational concept of perception and the role it plays in our experience of the world. Understanding perception to be an ongoing dialogue between ‘lived body’ and the world by which a lived body perceives, Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing-the-world, directly challenging the western Cartesian binary of mind/body. Merleau-Ponty describes the body’s typical mode of existence as ‘being-in-the world’, an orientation of the temporal body toward the world, in dialogue between the present body and the sedimentation of past body habits. Merleau-Ponty articulates the primacy of embodiment by offering an understanding of the body across a series of domains within one’s body, lived space, language, and sexuality.
My ongoing work is about queer modes of perceiving what is imaginable/ thinkable/visible for trans* bodies being-in-the-world. I explore queer orientations (Ahmed,2006) to questions of corporeality, relationality, temporality, materiality, and cultural memory, in terms both of affectivity and perception. Tracing a thread of critical phenomenology in Salamon’s work The Life and Death of Latisha King, I am interested in relationality in temporal terms. Salamon uses Merleau-Ponty’s theories of gesture and movement to offer a phenomenological reading of heteronormativity through the trans* identity of Latisha King after her death, via (cis-heteronorm) courtroom transcripts of the murder trial. Gesture and movement provide a framework for understanding how King’s individual body can be understood in the context of trans*ness as a site of a collective institutional body of trans* erasure. Specifically, I aim to think through the orientations of institutional structures as sites of trans* social death.
The Muscle:
I propose a hybrid written work with a research-creation digital installation artwork for my qualifying exam. Engaging theories of trans* feminisms within a framework of critical phenomenology, informed by theories of queer death studies, bounded in the fields of (counter)cultural studies and visual art, will be most necessary to qualify me to write a strong thesis proposal and proceed to write it. Through a of trans* scholarship, my project argues that trans* social death creates an out-of-time space of embodied/disembodied suspension where marginalized trans* culture negotiates terms of resilience and liberation. Lastly, I also need a close understanding of the queer invisible grief elicited within the habitation of trans* social death. Trans* Social Death: Praxis of Suspension seeks to define and deepen a theoretical framework of cultural practice and creative production.
What is an affinity of hammers (Ahmed) to a trans* carpenter??
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