Trans*imagination

Abstract

trans*imagination Alan Pelaez Lopez (bio) _____ The asterisk is a portal and a pause.The asterisk is not a signifier of a destination.A destination, here, is a form of violence.The asterisk is an invitation to meditate on a material condition with legal, social, and cultural consequences in the hopes that one can depart from that reality.The asterisk is not a star; it is not a burning rock, but some might argue that it is a rock that burns.The asterisk feels. It is a feeling of stillness and prolonged puncture.The asterisk is alive, but one cannot insist life onto it.The asterisk is not a person or an identity.The asterisk has been attended to and perhaps, it does not want to exist anymore. This is why the asterisk is a portal and a pause.1The asterisk is not an arrest, it is a pause. [End Page 233] The asterisk is not a hold, it is a portal, but the asterisk [temporarily] embraces the hold [of the ship :: belly :: sigh :: breath].The asterisk is not a signifier of gender or race or nation-states; all those kill, kill, kill.The asterisk is a portal and a pause. _____ On Zoom, Omi Salas-SantaCruz shares that one of the problems is that people always want to start with "the human" when extending care to the trans* experience. And that's the problem. The cis think they're extending care. But each attempt at care ends up in a desire for intelligibility. And what if the radical potential of trans* liberation is not legibility and uniformity but the endless possibilities within the simultaneity of experimentation, abstraction, opacity, and reworlding?A trans* future necessitates the undoing of mastery. If the trans* subject must first be human, then doesn't that limit all other trans* possibilities? Lock all understandings of trans* to a medicalized (or at least, psychoanalyzed) Western understanding?The cis spin planets to understand trans*interiority. And the tea is that there is no need for understanding. trans* is. That's it. trans* is trans*temporal, trans*hemispheric, trans*gressive, trans*imaginative, in trans*it, in trans*it always. There need be no more language. _____ On university campuses, there are classes on capital t, Trans Studies. Sometimes, Indigenous understandings of spirit, kinship, and land are subjugated to "transgender." And that's the limit of study. In the West, study does not always mean abolitionist planning or a rethinking of epistemologies and epistemes. In the West, to study is to lay out genealogies deemed legible to those who have been appointed the power to story :: those who have been gifted with the weapon of authorship. In the Global South, Indigenous, gender-expansive, and agender peoples self-author:fashion:make [End Page 234] every single day. And that's interesting to the West. Some of us in the Global South call it existing, or being, or the everyday, or the latest formation of the self. And the Global North sees it, marks it, and authors it as a Trans performance, Trans subjectivity, Trans articulation, Trans gesture, and it goes on and on and on.Sometimes, not everything is Trans. Sometimes, everything is trans*. Sometimes, things just are what they are when they are still. _____ I'm only trans* when gender(ing) is projected onto me. (Maybe that's a lie but right now, it feels true)When I am lying in bed and the room is spinning and my inhaler + nausea dissolvable pills + vertigo meds are too far away from my nightstand and I reach out to grab something and everything falls to the ground and I open my eyes and there is more spinning and suddenly everything is white, I am not Trans in that moment. I'm just a person trying to understand my body and my needs. But wait, "I'm just a person trying to understand my body and my needs" will be ejected, coded, and theorized as Trans by a lot of [ ].Sometimes, I forget that I am a gendered person. I do not forget that I have a body though. The body is often in too much chronic pain to...