The trans student as callejer@ or ‘streetwise theorist’: notes on epistemic justice and a call for trans*intramural reading

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the epistemic agency of American trans students/youths by emphasizing the ordinary practices of life-making as they are enacted or rather reflected textually. It draws on Latina feminist María Lugones’s scholarship on relationality to conceive of trans students/youths as ‘streetwise theorists’, or callejer@. I illustrate how new knowledges about streetwise trans youth can be generated through employing what I call the ‘trans*intramural protocol of reading’. I draw on texts retrieved from university archives and open access collections; resource guides and anthologies written by and for trans communities; as well as trans and queer zines published in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to illustrate the epistemic significance of such a reading practice. I conclude with a meditation on how an aesthetic relation to a text can rekindle memories to our past as trans subjects and therefore contribute to a new relation to histories of our own embodiments.