Transracial Selves, Transracial Bodies: The Interiority of Race
LAS E515-01 (Tues 1:10-4:10 pm) and 02 (Wed 8:00-11:00 am) Transracial Selves, Transracial Bodies: The Interiority of Race Thanks to the work and lives of transgender people, we now have room to understand our bodies in radically unbounded ways. Technological advances in surgery, hormonal therapy, psychiatry, and cultural warfare are catching up to the transgender presence that has always testified to the fact that the gendered body is not necessarily the body with which we were born, but one that can be crafted to match the real body of our psyche, our dreams. However, one’s racial self seems to remain doggedly tethered to biology. Blackness, Whiteness, Asianness, Latinness, the whole rainbow of racial identification, is still construed as biologically inescapable and inevitable. To speak of “transracialism” is to evoke self-delusion and community betrayal. But this cultural reaction is contrary to the everyday experience that actually finds racial identification as a process that is always transracial: declaring ourselves racially, we all cross restricted zones in becoming our true selves. We may all know (or think we know) what it means to be black, white, Asian, Latin, and “other” but what does it mean tofeel black, white, Asian, Latin, or “other”? In this course, we will use the discourse of transgenderism to build an alternate vocabulary of race.
Joon Oluchi Lee girlscallmurder.com lipstickeater.blogspot.comAssociate Professor of Gender Studies and Creative Writing Literary Arts & Studies Rhode Island School of Design 2 College St. Providence, RI 02903