Showing Up by Stepping Out: On Teaching and Being Trans in the Classroom
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As two trans-identified people operating from different structural locations within the academy, we are invested in forging solidarities across lines of identity and institutional vulnerability. Together, we engage in critical dialogue about social justice and community care in the context of a media classroom. We ask: how might we consider our presence, absence, pasts, histories, and potential futures as necessary and collaborative components of what it means to be a trans or non-binary person in shared institutional spaces? What does it mean to show up by stepping out? And what is the relationship between trans media and trans pedagogy?
CJ: I started making movies about trans-ness in response to the lack of meaningful moving image representation about trans and gender non-conforming people that I could find elsewhere. When I entered graduate school as a filmmaker, I was keenly aware that I would need to forge paths and alliances that centered trans and minoritized experiences outside of—and often in spite of—traditional disciplinary boundaries. The overlap of these two worlds—art making and the academy—offers fertile ground to imagine and invest in collaborative trans media pedagogies now that I am a teacher.
When I saw this call for papers, I immediately thought about our time together in Queer Film last semester. I love teaching queer content in all my classes, but the collision of queerness, theory, and art in that class specifically extends from my most impassioned personal and political thinking. I felt honored and bolstered by your presence, in particular your position within a cohort of upper-level students, many of whom self-identified as queer and contributed incisive and ongoing insight to our many conversations. I was motivated to think out loud with you about how we might take care of each other, as teachers and students, in the classroom. I’m asking this question specifically as a trans-identified teacher who steadfastly believes that the media classroom is a dynamic institutional space to consider the interrelatedness of art, activism, care, and the academy.
KJ: I was immersed in media cultures before I ever entered a media classroom. I came of age and first entered trans spaces in the era of what Andre Cavalcante has called “the queer utopia and vortex of Tumblr.”[1] I came into media studies somewhat haphazardly, in this way: seeking queer and trans resonance and finding it first in the assemblages and collages of mid-2010s trans Tumblr, and later in interdisciplinary Gender Studies classrooms. My experience of trauma, relationality, and media were inextricable; I both healed from and experienced trauma through trans kinship networks and varied online and offline media spaces. I continue to find care in trans spaces, from the campus collective to the classroom, and between the protest and the page.
As part of my own trans self-care recently, I have been reading Trans Care by Hil Malatino. His descriptions of the classroom as a trans space marked by the complex relationalities of trans communities resonated with me. Malatino describes his experiences as a trans professor teaching a gender and sexuality studies seminar amidst an increasingly transphobic and hostile climate in the US. In particular, he describes himself and his students as hypervigilant, with “a kind of fragility and brittleness to them, the kind of affect you cultivate when you can’t trust the world to see you, to hold you.”[2] In this context, even the most basic act of using students’ pronouns positions his classroom as a potential respite from the broader world.
Yet classrooms are far from utopias and trans classrooms are by no means trauma-free spaces. Viewing and creating media, in particular, can be both a healing and triggering act. The question for me, then, is not how we make trans classrooms trauma-free, but how might we make them into communities where we can care for ourselves and each other, together. As Malatino notes, care does not flow in a unidirectional manner: “Trans collectives and communities are deeply interwoven and interdependent, enmeshed in a way that makes distinguishing between the roles of carer and recipient difficult—they’re rotating, interchangeable, and reciprocal.”[3] From a pedagogical perspective, how do you negotiate the tension between trauma and safety, and carer and recipient in the trans media classroom?
CJ: I think often about—and return to—choice as a key pedagogical priority. While I was a postdoc at the University of Chicago, my friend and colleague Lauren Berlant once offered formative advice about trauma and teaching in the classroom. On the first day, Lauren tells students: “I can never predict what might trigger you, but I can do my best not to surprise you.” I took this commitment to heart and employ it often in my teaching—how can I set you up, as a student in my class, with as much context and information as possible so that you can take care of yourself and make informed decisions about your learning? In doing so, I hope to create an environment in which staying, leaving, speaking up, or remaining silent are all vital and valued, both personally and pedagogically. That said, I recognize that it might be a failed project from the start—which is to say, I cannot be sure what will impact whom, why, and when, so I try to foreground that media and their effects as affective, ever-changing and ephemeral. I further abate—or at least acknowledge—this failure by extending choice into modes of evaluation: for example, students get to choose their objects of attention when writing, and account for their own performance and engagement throughout the semester. From a student perspective, I wonder what choice in classroom contexts might mean to you, especially since media can be so unpredictable?
KJ: I remember you using that phrase—“I will do my best not to surprise you”—in class! I appreciate the way it neither infantilizes nor dismisses students. It signaled to me that you knew that trauma survivors would be students in your class, and that you trusted us to know best how to care for ourselves and would support us in doing so.
I return to a moment in class you and I have discussed, in which we viewed Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003), an impactful but heavy film that employs a multi-media collage technique to represent intergenerational trauma, queerness, and struggles with institutionalization and mental health. Before we began the screening, you let us know that we were under no obligation to stay in the classroom and that we could leave at any point, encouraging us to make decisions that best supported our learning and wellbeing. I sat with four of my friends in that class, and at various points preceding and during the screening, we all chose to leave the classroom. This occurred at different moments for each of us, as we balanced the need to protect our wellbeing with our desire to view and learn from the film. After leaving, the four of us found each other in a hallway outside of class, where we discussed the film and how it related to our own lives and traumas, we peer-supported each other in ongoing life challenges, we talked about Queer Film and we talked about everything but Queer Film.
While together, we anxiously calculated when the film would end in order to return in time to claim our marked assignments. As we returned, you privately met us in the hallway, welcomed us back, and told us that you believed that the conversations outside the classroom were just as valuable as the ones inside. I think we were all surprised by this reception, as we are used to slipping silently out of classrooms when our stress becomes too much and sneaking back in to rejoin the class at a later time. As a group of high-achieving, anxious students, we often have to choose between attending to the priorities of our scholarly brains and the needs of our neurodivergent and mentally ill bodyminds. Through your greeting, you welcomed all of our brains, minds, and bodies into the classroom as whole selves, not fragmented parts. I’m reminded here of the work of Margaret Price in articulating the term bodymind as a feminist disability studies mode of resistance against the forced Cartesian split of bodies and minds,[4] and of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in describing care webs as the love and labor of creating collective access.[5]
I am aware of academia’s expectations that the best students and instructors are thinking brains in jars, having compartmentalized away the rest of their identities, bodies, and experiences. This applies not only to the “unproductive” traumas and sicknesses of our brains, but often to our queerness and trans-ness as well.
KJ: So, I am breaking our own rules here by double-writing, but what are we as trans scholars if not disruptors? I am writing this note because I stumbled upon a beautiful article by Morgan Bimm and Margeaux Feldman that grapples with the same questions we are discussing. Feldman and Bimm propose a trauma-informed “femme pedagogy” as a way of approaching trauma in the classroom as queer and trans instructors and learners.[6] Femme pedagogy “recognizes teaching as care work” and turns towards community models of healing that understand trauma as endemic and ongoing.[7] It disrupts the Cartesian split between emotions and knowledge, as the authors write: “It’s okay to study affect theory; it’s another thing to live your affect in the classroom. The ways in which emotions are framed as a disruption to learning, rather than integral to learning, turns the university into a socially toxic environment.”[8] I perceived you as resisting this culture in Queer Film, and I wonder what your experiences with this forced compartmentalization have been, or how else you have resisted it?
CJ: As I was gearing up to move from Chicago to Victoria, a colleague offered me some tenure-track job advice that I interpreted as a question: what would it mean for your research, your teaching, and your service to be one and the same? The question signals the ways institutions can so often fracture workers from their most impassioned pursuits. On the whole, I do my best to resist the institutionally supported impulse to prioritize academic modes over other less dominant modes of meaning making such as art and activism. This resistance emboldens my investments in the media classroom as a place where we are casting theory and writing against and alongside historical and contemporary cultural production. With this in mind, my colleagues’ question becomes: what would it mean to treat academia, art, and activism as always already overlapping? When considered in this way, care becomes a critical component of collaborative pedagogy—from syllabus making, to class discussions, grading, and co-authoring. What could it mean to imagine evaluation as a reciprocal and shared activity? How can classes become incubators for new ideas where teachers and students create the pathways, contours, and learning trajectories together? And how can we approach these questions within neoliberal institutional structures that historically oppose such democratization and deny lateralizing methods that remove hierarchies between teachers and students?
I’m reminded of Jane Tompkins’ “Pedagogy of the Distressed,” a reckoning with the limits and vulnerabilities of teaching and a call to transform methods.[9] Tompkins is in dialogue with Paulo Freire as she argues for education as a practice of freedom: she asks what it might mean to move away from performative models of teaching and learning—i.e. let me perform my knowledge to/for you—toward collaborative modes which make learning more enjoyable and less anxiety-provoking for both teachers and students. Tompkins suggests that teachers would benefit greatly from offering their main ideas up front, endeavoring to hold no pedagogical secrets. I’m compelled by the suggestion to make things even more explicit: what if every class began with a series of questions: here is who I am, here is why I think we are together, here is what I can bring, and what might that mean for/to you as we craft this future together? This is particularly important in the media classroom as we move in relation to images and their always contextual and indeterminable impacts.
KJ: I often return to the words of Kai Cheng Thom, a trans woman and writer, performer, cultural worker, and speaker. She writes, “So in the midst of despair, I have come to believe that love—the feeling of love, the politics of love, the ethics and ideology and embodiment of love—is the only good option in this time of apocalypse. What else do we have?”[10] I echo her sentiment that love is all we have, and extend it further to wonder how the classroom might change if we embraced love and care as foundational practices. Here, we might even be mirroring and echoing the care work of queer and trans image creators who we engage on screens and in conversation: what new pedagogical futures and queer and trans worlds can we imagine and thus bring into existence? We have begun this work here, on the page, and enact it together in our daily practices of teaching, learning, and co-creating.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Megan Ingram, Nathan Snaza, Nael Bhanji, and Dan Vena.
Author Bios
Chase Joynt is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Victoria. His latest film, No Ordinary Man, was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020.
Kai Jacobsen is an undergraduate Honors Sociology and Gender Studies student at the University of Victoria. They are a 2020 3M National Student Fellow and have previously completed research on trans communities on Tumblr. They are also an activist, peer leader, and engaged member of queer and trans communities in Victoria and beyond.
Endnotes
Andre Cavalcante, “Tumbling Into Queer Utopias and Vortexes: Experiences of LGBTQ Social Media Users on Tumblr,” Journal of Homosexuality 66, no. 12 (October 15, 2019): 1715–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2018.1511131. ↑
Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), “Surviving Trans Antagonism,” https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452965574. ↑
Malatino, Trans Care, “Beyond Burnout” ↑
Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Hypatia 30, no.1 (2015): 268–284, https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12127. ↑
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018). ↑
Morgan Bimm and Margeaux Feldman, “Towards a Femme Pedagogy, or Making Space for Trauma in the Classroom,” MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, January 26, 2020, https://maifeminism.com/towards-a-femme-pedagogy-or-making-space-for-trauma-in-the-classroom/. ↑
Bimm and Feldman, Towards a Femme Pedagogy. ↑
Bimm and Feldman, Towards a Femme Pedagogy. ↑
Jane Tompkins, “Pedagogy of the Distressed,” College English 52, no. 6 (1990): 653–660, https://doi.org/10.2307/378032. ↑
Kai Cheng Thom. I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019), 10. ↑
