Reflections on a Cis Discipline & Industry

Abstract

The scholarship of radical queer and transfeminist of color scholars like C. Riley Snorton and Maria Lugones has drastically redrawn the boundaries of Black and anticolonial thinking by demonstrating how gender, sexuality, race, ableism, nationalism, and white supremacy are co-produced. Black and anticolonial geographies have become more central to geographic thought; still, geographic research is less likely to address the larger, systemic co-production of “others.” Further, trans geographies remains an incredibly small field with few to no job prospects despite the anti-trans fervor that has long defined society and is recently amplified.

Building from the “(more) reflections on a white discipline” of Puildo (2002), Bruno and Faiver-Serna (2022), among other scholars—most of them emerging scholars and BIPOC, queer, and/or trans-identified—what next steps can geography take to address the absence and erasure of trans* lives, spaces, theories, and methods in our scholarship? How can that work help to identify and address the transphobia in our universities and everyday lives? I draw on trans*, queer, and lesbian theorists and activists, alongside my own experiences as both the first out trans person to be tenured in a geography department and being forced to resign because of a lack of support for my basic needs. My goal is to make inroads for geographic thought and theory to understand that the isolation and silencing of the “others,” and the exhaustion in addressing “so many identities” in their research are both the work of racial colonial capitalism that must be interrupted for our survival.