In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 VIC MUÑOZ Gender/Sovereignty What happens to research when the researched become the researchers? —Linda Tuhiwai Smith To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. —Paulo Freire What happens to feminist pedagogy when feminist trans-people of color name the world? In an earlier work, “Trapped in the Wrong Classroom: Making Decolonial Trans-Cultural Spaces in Women’s Studies,”1 I began to think about relationships between pedagogies of critical consciousness2 and transing3 as a praxis for decolonization.4 I took the master narrative about trans-people “being trapped in the wrong body”5 and thought about the classroom as a colonized and colonizing space, for trans-students and trans-educators, which needed to be transformed to become a place of dialogical practice.6 I began to imagine a space for dialogue that did not trap—colonize—my body and experiences as a trans- Boricua7 professor of psychology and gender studies. Different from the metaphor of being trapped in the wrong body, what I felt was that I was trapped in the wrong classroom in my displaced/diasporic body. To be “trapped in the wrong classroom,” for me, is to be aware of but not to take action against how colonization, racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, transphobia, and language structure and constrain everything I do as an educator. It is to be dehumanized through a process of forgetting, denying, and being made invisible. In this chapter, I attempt to narrate a decolonizing pedagogy of transing that might create spaces for trans-, for sovereignty, and for gender: what I think of as gender/sovereignty spaces. This involves a process of remembering, critical reflection on where I am located, and a desire for and praxis of education as a process of humanization, social justice, and liberation. This chapter is an account of my pedagogical transitioning. All learning, in this country, takes place on Indigenous lands that were stolen through the removal, destruction, and colonization—the systematic 24 Vic Muñoz genocide—of Indigenous peoples. Against this continuing colonialism, Indigenous peoples struggle on a daily basis to recover, to heal, and to create peace and justice. The Indigenous people of the land where I teach are the Haudenosaunee. Specifically, the college where I teach is situated in Cayuga Nation Territory. When I write that pedagogy must be grounded, I do not mean that as a metaphor. What I mean is that non-Indigenous educators, scholars, academics, and activists have to educate ourselves in the history and present struggles of the lands with Indigenous peoples who are hosting our visits. From this point of view, I teach as a long-time guest in Cayuga Nation Territory. As a guest on stolen and contested lands (see the Onondaga Land Rights statement8) and as an educator, I have the obligation to make connections between the denials of rights to Indigenous people, trans- and queer people, and those who are all the above. Transing pedagogy, for me, is grounded in a struggle for decolonization and transformation that starts by remembering and honoring where I am located. This project frames trans- and feminist classrooms as historical spaces where simultaneous realities are generated, contested, and lived within the past, present , and future against the continuing processes of colonization and imperialism . This means, for me, that pedagogy must be grounded in place, past, present, and future in addition to race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/abilities, language, and ethnicities. To create trans- cultural decolonial spaces for social diversity and justice, all the above (and more) are needed. Gender/sovereignty is an approach that contests the Eurocentric medicalized model of trans- identities by placing gender identities within a broader framework of antiracist and decolonial struggles. It is an attempt to create spaces for gender that are self-determined and that can negotiate the interminable tensions that exist between heterosexism, Christianity, colonialism, and homophobia for Native LGBT people and trans- people of color. But first, I need to locate myself within this project. At the 2008 American Educational Research Association annual conference, I attended symposia sponsored by the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Special Interest Group (IPP-SIG). I immediately saw relationships between the ideas presented and my own Boricua history. One was the idea presented by Laiana Wong9 that to speak Hawaiian was not enough to support anticolonial Native Hawaiian education if the language was learned as a translation of thinking in English. Rather, Wong proposed that it is crucial to, in his words, “Speak Hawaiian in...

Share