Introduction

Introduction Z NICOLAZZO, SUSAN B. MARINE, and FRANCISCO J. GALARTE n 2005, the Sundance docu-series Transgeneration first aired, chronicling an I entire academic year in the lives of four trans*-identified college students and introducing viewers to issues that trans-identified college students grapple with at institutions of higher education. Ten years later, as transgender studies has begun institutionalizing itself as an interdisciplinary field and “transgender” and trans* narratives have become almost routine in mainstream entertainment, the editors of this special issue on trans* pedagogy find ourselves confronted with a paradox. While there is in general unprecedented social awareness of trans* identities, (particular) trans* people, and trans* issues, there has yet to be a serious con- centrated effort to explore trans* subjectivities, identities, and experiences in educational contexts. For example, in the three seminal publications that signal the emergence of trans* studies as a field (i.e., The Transgender Studies Reader, The Transgender Studies Reader 2,andTSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly), there is only one article that has a specific focus on formal educational contexts and pedagogical concerns. This is not to suggest there has been no scholarly research or writing on trans* issues in education. Much to the contrary, scholars have produced exceptional work regarding trans* people and educational experiences in other venues. Radical Teacher devoted an entire special issue, titled “Beyond the Special Guest—Teaching ‘Trans’ Now,” to the topic in 2011 (Agid and Rand 2011). The voices and experiences of trans* educators and students have been centered in a variety of disciplinary scholarly texts and journal articles (e.g., Catalano, McCarthy, and Shlasko 2007; Jourian 2014; Marine 2011a, 2011b; Nicolazzo 2014). However, trans* experiences in education have not yet been featured in the main venues of the emerging field of transgender studies. In an attempt to address this significant gap, this special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly takes up matters of schooling, learning, and pedagogy. Both Paulo Freire (2000) and bell hooks (1994) declared that education should be a “practice of freedom,” one that enables individuals to “deal critically TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 2, Number 3 * August 2015 367 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2926360 ª 2015 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/2/3/367/485487/367.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 368 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (Freire 2000: 34). All too often, however, formal educational practices foster conformity, deter necessary transgressions, and systemically seek to regulate rather than radicalize (Aronowitz 2004; Entin, Ohmann, and O’Malley 2013). This is particularly true with regard to the concept of ‘genderism,’ which Darryl Hill defined as the “system of beliefs that reinforces a negative evaluation based on gender nonconformity . the cultural notion that gender is an important basis by which to judge people and that nonbinary genders are anomalies” (2003: 119). This concept, which refers to the biopolitics of gender from an overarching societal perspective, has also been found to operate within educational contexts (Bilodeau 2005, 2009; Marine and Catalano 2014; Nicolazzo 2015), regulating the lives of trans* people and thereby mediating how they navigate such spaces. We contend that formal education typically enacts genderism. With this special issue, “Trans*formational Pedagogies,” we seek to reinvigorate ongoing conversations about education as a practice of freedom by exploring ways in which educational processes can specifically challenge the oppressive aspects of the binary gender system. In particular, the pieces included in this special issue center on the following questions: What counts as learning? What is pedagogy, and where does pedagogical practice occur? What are the roles of educational institutions in shaping and responding to genderism? How do educational institutions delimit and/or proliferate possibilities for the doing, thinking, and practicing of trans* genders? Who is excluded from educational systems? To this end, we have included several selections that address what room there may be for liberatory educational praxis, particularly given the overwhelming prevalence of state-sanctioned surveillance and neoliberal accountability standards. Finally, while we attempted to engage a robust set of questions regarding the current possibilities, limits, and experiences of trans* educational contexts, we also thought it important to suggest how the nascent conversations regarding trans* subjectivities, identities, and concerns in educational settings exceed the bound- aries of the school grounds and disciplinary formations. As Julian Carter, David Getsy, and Trish Salah (2014) suggest in their introduction to the TSQ special issue on “Trans Cultural Production,” the politics of trans* in/visibility are knottily entangled. Similarly, the push and pull of education as an apparatus of surveillance and the social reproduction of the status quo on the one hand and as an environment latent with liberatory potential on the other makes any discussion about educational institutions fraught with dif- ficulty. The ways in which gender, race, class, dis/ability, faith, and sexuality coalesce to permit certain bodies—by which we mean both conceptually and literally—to enter, navigate, and succeed in education are by no means uniform. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/2/3/367/485487/367.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 NICOLAZZO, MARINE, and GALARTE * Introduction 369 As Grant et al. (2011) highlighted, trans* people—and in particular, trans* people of color—experience severely decreased life chances in terms of employment, health care, housing, and financial security. As a result, entrance into formal educational structures is also heavily policed, often resulting in the classroom doors remaining shut to trans* people. Furthermore, even when trans* people do gain admittance into educational systems, the overarching system of societal genderism, itself replicated in educational contexts, renders these contexts increasingly dangerous, risky, and alienating for trans* people (e.g., Rankin et al. 2010). This is particularly true when examining the effects of educational envi- ronments for trans* people of color, especially trans* women of color, who are disproportionately targeted. For example, consider the case of Black transgender activist, Monica Jones, who was arrested for the vague charge of “manifesting prostitution,” which trans* people and their allies translate as “walking while trans*.” Jones, a known trans* activist, had been among those protesting Project ROSE (Reaching Out to the Sexually Exploited), “an anti-prostitution collabo- ration between the Arizona State University School of Social Work, the Phoenix Police Department, and Catholic Charities, which claims to provide services to workers within the sex industry through a prostitution diversion program” (Strangio 2014). Jones’s arrest exposes the conjoining of racism, sexism, and transphobia in neoliberal initiatives such as Project ROSE. It illustrates how educational institutions work in conjunction with nonprofit organizations and other state-sanctioned and funded initiatives to criminalize trans* women of color, thereby simultaneously prohibiting their entrance into educational envi- ronments and subjecting them to a system of mass incarceration that Michelle Alexander (2010) has aptly named “The New Jim Crow” for communities of color. In conceptualizing this special issue, we also struggled with the constant (re)framing of education by US scholars from an ethnocentric perspective, whereby the prevailing myth of US exceptionalism overshadows the possibilities for understanding non-US educational contexts as promising spaces to think about, interrogate, and practice shifting notions of gender. To this end, we sought to encourage submissions that engaged notions of pedagogy in the broadest possible ways, including in contexts other than that of the United States. While we were encouraged to see articles from European educational settings submitted, we also recognize that these submissions were still from Western Europe and thus still position various other educational contexts as “other,” “unknown,” and, by extension, “exotic.” Therefore, while we hope this special issue will be a pro- ductive space for the integration of gender identity and trans* lives into fields related to education, the lack of consideration of a wide range of geopolitical areas means that the essays we have curated on schooling as a site for the practice of gender freedom present a partial and limited picture. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/2/3/367/485487/367.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 370 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly In this sense, we envisioned this special issue as presenting scholarly work within the fields of education that demands further exploration and attention. Rather than being read as canonical, the scholarly voices and perspectives in this issue serve to disrupt educational spaces from the staid notions of binary gender that permeate them. Indeed, there have been seismic shifts in some educational contexts regarding how scholars and practitioners conceptualize gender in rela- tion to their thinking

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