Radically Loving Trans People of Color: Resisting Easy Explanations of Identity in Education

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/rj430631x

Abstract

This study is intended as a queeruption (McCready, 2019) in the way trans lives are considered in education research, policy, and practice. Queeruptions are required by a status quo that drives hundreds of pieces of legislation targeting the rights of transgender people alongside concerted efforts to restrict dialogue about race in the classroom. As queeruptive, this study is queer, not in terms of identity categories but rather in its focus on process, blurring binaries, and moving beyond the traditional contexts associated with US schooling. The study is eruptive in its focus on building and transforming. The qualitative methods employed in this study, such as ride-along interviews, embraced process and mutuality. Rather than pain, institutional welfare, or (in)accessible medical transition (common themes in the ways trans life is understood in empirical research), the focus of this study is love. Owing to lineages of scholars, teachers, activists and transcestors who have insisted that the lives of trans people of color are sacred, this dissertation study also centers the epistemologies of five trans people of color. In exploring how racialization and transness influence the way a group of trans people of color in the Southeastern United States has come to know and practice love, this study carries practical and scholarly implications for identity studies in education and understanding new pathways for approaching coalition building and trusting process.

Creator