Transpedagogies: A Roundtable Dialogue
- Transpedagogies: A Roundtable Dialogue
At the Kitchen Table (Again)
The eleven participants in this roundtable submitted their work for consideration to the editors of this issue of WSQ. Rather than include just one essay from authors, the editors wondered how it would work to include a group of authors who had proposed to tackle trans-focused pedagogical issues within women’s studies. The editors invited us to moderate this “textual conversation” with the understanding that one of our mandates was to imagine practical ways to produce this more experimental form. To make space for the multiplications and unexpected convergences to pop out of this dialogue, we adopted the term “transpedagogies” as a coalitional concept that includes transsexual, transgender, and gender/queer pedagogical perspectives. While it is imperfect, we are excited by the outcome, as the results reflect a community effort to create a dialogical space that invites further participation.
From our first readings of research-based abstracts, we identified a series of themes through which to frame ideas for how this varied group of participants might be placed in conversation with each other. The themes that emerged were named thus: Feminist Trans-Masculinities/Femininities; TransCrossings: Cultures and Histories; Transgendering Male Privilege: Transguys in Feminist and Women’s Studies; Transdisciplinary Work in the Academy; Making the Body In/Visible in the Class-room; and Transforming Women’s Studies. With these themes as a jumping-off point, all the authors and coauthors wrote individual statements grounded in their teaching, scholarship, experiences, and theoretical affiliations. Subsequently, the authors and coauthors provided written shorter responses to two of the statements. And, finally, the authors and coauthors responded briefly to the responses written about their own statements. We compiled everyone’s writing and sent the completed [End Page 288] piece to all the participants. We then received feedback in the form of questions and suggestions as well as editorial corrections. We took all these and integrated them into the piece.
Our guiding theme has been to engage in a conversation that would spark a wider, more diverse and expansive one among scholars, activists, and educators. We hoped to explore the experiences of transgender, transsexual, and gender/queer students and faculty within specific learning environments, such as women’s colleges and doctoral programs, as well as the experiences of those teaching and working with variously trans and queer faculty and students.
Because of space limitations, the published Transpedagogies Roundtable does not include all the original statements and responses, but the complete piece, including all works cited by the participants, is available online at http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/ .
Conclusion: Sparking the Dialectics
[Begin Page 303] Audre Lorde once stated, “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (1984, 111). The creativity sparked by feminist knowledge production has affected the ways people experience the relations of power that shape our encounters with each other locally, globally, intimately, intra- and inter-personally, socially, and across cultures. It is time for practitioners in women’s studies to engage these complex ideas about the politics of difference and “the fund of necessary polarities” more concretely.
It seems to us that the dialectics offered by the participants in this transpedagogy roundtable dialogue provide many valuable pedagogical, material, and practical possibilities for such work. The central questions and themes raised here suggest many of these possibilities. Yet they also signal some crucial challenges that continue to block the ability of educational, activist, and scholarly women’s studies communities to confront and grow from and through transformative and transformed knowledges.
Out of this roundtable dialogue have emerged necessary and urgent questions. Ambrose Kirby sent us questions in relation to our writing about our experiences with our student Will Liberi. We believe that these questions are important for all of us to consider: What impact do our bodies have when we step into the classroom, the teacher’s lounge, faculty meetings, the dean’s office? In writing about trans issues, where and how do we locate ourselves? How are we read? How are we viewed by trans students? How do we engage...
