This Dossier starts with the provocative question: what is the relationship (status) between transgender media and pedagogy?

It’s complicated.

It’s complicated because transgender media is still a rather slippery categorical container for audiovisual and performative work that may or may not rely explicitly on the presence of trans and non-binary creators, performers, or audiences?[1] Shaped by issues of (in)visibility and visuality, debates about trans media are particularly useful to questions of pedagogical curation (e.g. which works should be seen or made visible to students?). Yet, the discursive “trap” of hypervisibility and invisibility described by scholars is often over-centered through questions of whiteness leaving trans producers of color, who have pointed out the simultaneous co-option of racialized creative labor and erasure of racialized lives in media cultures, especially vulnerable.[2] In the classroom, this tension can translate itself as an overuse of “accessible” trans media (whitewashed and appropriated) while erasing racialized trans lives and creativity.

It’s complicated because even after defining the boundaries of trans media for one’s syllabus, there remains the unknowable outcome between intent and effect: how will students respond to these representations? What kinds of intellectual and emotional labor must be expended to ethically engage with trans media? Whose voices and experiences are lost or centered when decisions are made for and within institutionalized classroom spaces? Like any relationship between a media object and its inclusion within instructional discourses, trans media pedagogies are marked by the schism between the representational aims of the media object itself, one’s pedagogical goals in its selection and presentation, and the combined outcome of these approaches. As with other media, the results may not adequately reflect the possibilities of the selected text as well one’s pedagogical aims, thereby making “failure” an ever-present reality both for instructors and students alike. Although we as trans-queer scholars may wish to embrace the synergetic energies failure makes possible, to fail at teaching trans media is to perpetuate circuits of systemic violence against individuals and communities in which these objects are produced and circulated.[3] Furthermore, failure risks the project of “transpedagogies” entirely, which as Francisco J. Galarte describes, must “offer students the tools they need to participate in the political and economic power structures that shape the boundaries of gender categories, with the goal of changing those structures in ways that create greater freedom.”[4]

Considering the weight of what is at stake, some may see the featured inclusion of trans cultural work in post-secondary classrooms as already a “success.” In turn, we ask: does the proliferation of trans voices and presences within the classroom space easily translate as a sign of progress? Given the increasing inclusion of trans studies within post-secondary institutions, both in class syllabi and as stand-alone courses, and trans politics in larger equity initiatives within universities and colleges, are all forms of trans representation necessarily “good”? In the same vein, can an instructor ever really lay claim to an unquestionable “good” pedagogy?

Our use of “good,” rather than being evaluative, gestures to a willingness to tolerate “difficult knowledge.”[5] The inclusion of minority representations and narratives within the institutional space of the neoliberal university necessarily leads to an engagement with the kinds of “difficult knowledge” that Deborah P. Britzman and Alice J. Pitt have previously theorized as arising from the intersection between the curriculum and broader structures of ongoing trauma within historical and contemporary social structures. In this sense, trans media representations must always reckon with questions of authenticity and privilege. Inevitably, these concerns carry through to the interactions between instructors and their students, as well as the infrastructures in which they work. What is the relevance of media-based approaches to the understanding or exploration of trans lives, experiences, and narratives? How do instructors and students negotiate the burdens of their own identifications as they navigate trauma in the classroom and beyond? How might trans media pedagogies challenge the everyday violences of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and ongoing imperialism within the neoliberal structure of the university?

The authors in this Dossier speak to the timeliness of these questions, while reinforcing an urgent need to develop pedagogical strategies that can sustain world-making projects of radical futurity. To begin, David Tenorio illustrates how the inclusion of alternative forms of media practices like digital storytelling enrich the classroom space through their disruption of transnormative representational trajectories. Specifically, Tenorio turns to the everyday narratives of Latin/x trans women, whose lives are marked within a violent economy of necropolitical capital, to expose the haunting presence of trans of color life and death in the U.S. feminist classroom. Using a select archive of digital storytelling projects, Tenorio shows how recentering the voices of these women allows students to meditate on models of feminist praxis, coalition building, and ethical community engagement, as well as questions of technological access and knowledge production done in service of the U.S. academy. Tenorio’s “Teaching Disloyalty” makes clear the role of disruption in trans pedagogical aims, and the inextricability of trans media from the afterlife of imperialism and conquest.

These violences, moreover, are not limited to the nation-state but carry through to the institutional violences within the hallowed halls of the “ivory tower” as well. Indeed, as Danielle Seid illustrates in her provocatively titled essay “We’re Still Here,” trans-friendly “virtue-signaling” has become a form of institutional currency that lubricates the gears of post-secondary neoliberalism agendas. But whose voices and representations are valuable to these institutions? What of the precarious narratives that seek to dismantle, disrupt, and disturb self-congratulatory appeals to trans inclusion, like those profiled in Tenorio’s contribution? As Seid argues, within these institutional structures, the incorporation of trans-specific imagery tends to bypass any real interrogation of the everyday violences of ongoing settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and U.S. imperialism. Through a place-based approach that emphasizes Native Hawaiian paradigms, “We’re Still Here” illustrates how a trans media pedagogy is inextricable from, and must be rooted in, decolonial and anti-imperialist frameworks.

This emphasis on anti-racist activism as praxis and pedagogy likewise informs Marty Fink’s contribution, “HIV/AIDS, Trans Teaching, and Defunding the Police.” Drawing upon their experience in teaching trans studies in a post-secondary institution, Fink problematizes neoliberal universities for their reliance upon conceptualizations of trans-ness within tropes of mainstream acceptability and easy assimilation into capitalist structures. The question of trans liberation and gender self-determination, as Fink reflects, is intimately linked to broader strategies calling for decriminalization, anti-racism, and prison abolition. Bridging AR technology together with a contemporary art and activist project on HIV/AIDS, Fink’s anti-oppressive framework pushes the reader to think about how a “good” trans curriculum requires ongoing engagement with difficult conversations about decriminalization and prison abolition in an era marked by ongoing anti-Black violence.

If the above authors rightly indicate the limitations of teaching trans media within colonial, neoliberal institutional spaces and the need to push against these barriers, Kai Jacobsen and Chase Joynt offer a compassionate dialogue on what it may mean to “show up by stepping out.” Together, the authors think through the infrastructures of care necessary for creating trauma-informed, queer-trans media classrooms within the toxic confines of ableist academic cultures. Written as a conversation between Jacobsen (student) and Joynt (instructor), the authors reflect back on their shared Queer Film class and the collaborative strategies used to de-hierarchize the instructional space. Fundamental to their dialogue is an awareness of the reciprocal relationship between student and instructor, and the role each plays in cultivating a space of self-determination and possibility through mutual acts of recognition and choice.

This Dossier sheds light upon the ongoing and violent co-option of radical trans politics and artmaking practices by higher education. If trans media is to survive its engulfment into the neoliberal institution, recently incentivized by broad strokes Equity Diversity Initiatives (EDI), strategies like the ones discussed in this Dossier will prove to be essential pedagogical guides. The media objects we bring into our classrooms make demands of our attention, requiring continued engagement beyond a simple viewing or screening; they must be worked on through pre- and post-viewing discussions, as well as through the affects and vulnerabilities that these materials might engender. To accommodate, our pedagogical strategies must be dynamic, just as trans art objects are always in flux, adapting, resisting stasis and containment, so too must our teaching.

Author Bios

Dan Vena (he/him) is a queer-trans, white settler academic with chronic pain. He is invested in scholarly and pedagogical practices of collectivity, with the aim toward decolonial, anti-racist, queer-trans, disabled, anti-capitalist & neurodivergent collaborative world-making. He works as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Queen’s University in Katarokwi (Kingston), Canada. He is also the co-founder of the Film and Media Department’s The Witch Institute, and is currently working alongside his frequent collaborator, Tamara de Szegheo Lang, to recover 1990’s Canadian lesbian film history (funded by SSHRC).

Nael Bhanji (he/him) is an Assistant Professor at Trent University’s Department of Gender & Social Justice. As a critical race and trans studies theorist, his research draws upon psychoanalysis and affect theory in order to explore articulations of necropolitics, racialization, and counter-terrorism within an increasingly globalized trans movement. He is particularly invested in tracing the affective circulation of expendability, decay, and death in public imaginaries. His work appears in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, The Transgender Studies Reader 2, Trans Studies Quarterly 4.1, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Trans Lives in a Global(izing) World, Somatechnics, and The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities.

Endnotes

1. See Aryeh Conrad, “Towards a Truer Representation,” Summer Research 239 (2015); Jack Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Laura Horak, “Trans Studies,” Feminist Media Histories 4, no. 2 (April 2018): 201–206; Cáel M. Keegan, Lana and Lilly Wachowski (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2018); Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “Film,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (May 2014), 86–89; Viviane Namaste, Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2005); Joelle Ryan, “Reel Gender: Examining the Politics of Trans Images in Film and Media” (PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, 2009); Eliza Steinbock, “Toward Trans Cinema,” in The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender, ed. Kristin Lené Hole et al. (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2017), 395–406; Wibke Straube,“Trans Cinema and Its Exit Scapes: A Transfeminist Reading of Utopian Sensibility and Gender Dissidence in Contemporary Film” (PhD diss., Linköping University, 2014); Jonathan Rachel Williams, “What (and Where) Is Trans Cinema?,” (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2011), 45–68. ↑

2. Jules Rosskam, “Porous Cels,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 4 (November 2014): 586-589; Eliza Steinbock, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019); Tourmaline et al., Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: New Museum, 2017). ↑

3. See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011). ↑

4. Francisco J. Galatre, “Pedagogy,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1-2 (January 2014): 145–148. ↑

5. Deborah P. Britzman and Alice J. Pitt, “Pedagogy and Clinical Knowledge: Some Psychoanalytic Observations on Losing and Refinding Significance,” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 24, no.2 (2004): 353–374. ↑