&Now 2019 Conference

Five years after Time Magazine announced “The Transgender Tipping Point” by featuring Laverne Cox on its cover, transgender and gender nonconforming people find themselves in heightened states of both visibility and precarity. These changes are distributed unevenly across transgender and gender nonconforming populations, with the brunt of structural and physical violence continuing to affect Black and Latinx transwomen.

In this session of creative/queer-theoretical praxis, we invite participants of all genders to write into the relations and tensions among visibilities and precarities as we seek trans/gendered justice. We ask: what happens if we open up gender by rewriting it again and again through our embodied subject positions, such as skin tone, place/space, citizenships and belongings, and access to social and financial capital? What alliances form and dissolve, and how can we work through the ephemeral and concrete realities of gender to create narratives and anti-narratives that challenge and affirm?

There will be (2) components to this workshop.

1. A small-group consciousness-raising exercise examining complimentary and diverging concepts in gender and justice through short texts from various disciplines: posthumanist queer theory, poetry, creative/experimental essay, scientific feminist criticism, crip theory, and conflict analysis and resolution.

2. Writing provocations from presenters ask participants to explore, in any genres or queering of genres, their own complexified visions of gender, community, and justice. Our interdisciplinary writing prompts will draw upon, for example:
a. Narrative conflict resolution and the use of genre-specific restorying
b. Poems and experimental work by transgender and gender nonconforming writers
c. Modes of comedy for educational communication
d. Somatic and affective experiential healing

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