Description:

Negative Affects and Other Pedagogies: Thinking Black, Latinx, and Trans 

This talk sits at the interstices of race, gender, and education in hemispheric Latinx American studies. Transdisciplinary by nature, “Negative Affects and Other Pedagogies” asks how the transgender body of color interacts, converses, at times, disagrees with philosophy and theory. Centering Black and Latinx American performance art, Cervantes-Gómez argues for the necessary right of trans people of color to think “negatively” about trans of color life. Coining new concepts within the bourgeoning field of trans of color theory and critique, this talk introduces “body borders” as a framework to think through how the University as an enterprise of thinking might agitate, irritate, or even cross those borders of the trans body, when we often find trans of color life to be a contradictory or disparate text to political and social theories writ large. This talk conceptualizes race and gender as a trans pedagogical process that moves across disciplines (including continental philosophy, critical race theory, performance studies, and queer/trans theory) to redefine how bodies move and negotiate with in material worlds where other fictions and feelings also roam. At stake is an affective responsibility to give a historical account of queer and trans of color intellectual and artistic production in education that problematizes and extends the categories of diversity, equity, and inclusion.