Thanks for your patience during our recent outage at scalar.usc.edu. While Scalar content is loading normally now, saving is still slow, and Scalar's 'additional metadata' features have been disabled, which may interfere with features like timelines and maps that depend on metadata. This also means that saving a page or media item will remove its additional metadata. If this occurs, you can use the 'All versions' link at the bottom of the page to restore the earlier version. We are continuing to troubleshoot, and will provide further updates as needed. Note that this only affects Scalar projects at scalar.usc.edu, and not those hosted elsewhere.
12020-03-19T12:20:45-07:00micha cárdenas42dd48ce3b8953275b525403960f3891f0fb44f3195843plain2021-11-15T23:49:08-08:00micha cárdenas42dd48ce3b8953275b525403960f3891f0fb44f3I look to the movement, media and art of trans people of color in order to describe a poetics—the choices involved in turning thought into action. That action can be directed towards the creation of an object, the ordering of words, or the creation of media or an expression of movement.Building on the work of women of color feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and Chela Sandoval, scholars Jose Muñoz and Roderick Ferguson have elaborated on a field of scholarship they have named “queer of color critique.” Their work is an important foundation for this book, yet critique is a mode that is less expansive than my goals. Poetic Operations examines and develops trans of color poetics that can open possibilities of life for trans people of color in movement. I consider movement expansively to include elements of transnational migration, performance, and mobility. Trans of color poetics is a creation, an offering, not a prescription or a definition. I describe what I perceive in these works, and the ways these works contribute to a decolonial politics that aim to end colonial violence enacted to enforce gender binaries, racial hierarchies and settler colonial rule. In this chapter, I analyze linguistic poetry by trans of color poets, as well as installation art, to form a basis for analyses of digital media in later chapters. I show how trans of color poetics emerges from Latinx, mestizx and two-spirit ways of being in the world and is informed by women of color feminism. The chapter concludes with a return to linguistic poetry, by Kai Cheng Thom, a Canadian author of Chinese ancestry, to consider how trans of color poetics gestures beyond the present realities of violence, towards futures of community care. While these authors and artists conceptions of gender and identity exceed the Western definition of transgender, their poetics unites them. In all of these works, the cut, the stitch and the shift are important poetic gestures that form a repertoire of trans of color poetics.
