Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography

Embodied Theorizing from the Margins

Amber L. Johnson, Benny LeMaster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000068177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Awards

Innovator Award for Outstanding Edited Collection, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Caucus, Central States Communication Association, 2023.

Outstanding Book in Performance Studies and Autoethnography, Performance Studies and Autoethnography Division, Central States Communication Association, 2023.

Book of the Year, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Communication Studies Division, National Communication Association, 2022.

Book of the Year, Ethnography Division, National Communication Association, 2020.

Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography showcases a collection of narrative and autoethnographic research that unpacks the complexity of gender at its intersections, i.e. by ability, race, sexuality, religion, beauty, geography, spatiality, community, performance, politics, socio-economic status, education, and many other markers of difference.

The book focuses on gender as it is lived, chaperoned, and chaperones other social identity categories. It tells stories that reveal problematic gender binaries, promising gender futures, and everything in between—they ask us to rethink what we assume to be true, real, and normal about gender identity and expression. Each essay, written by both gender variant and cisgender scholars, explores cultural phenomena that create space for us to re-imagine, re-think, and create new ways of being.

This book will be useful for undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional degree students, particularly in the fields of gender studies, qualitative methods, and communication theory.

SECTION IV

Queering History, Imagining Futures

The term “futurity” signals a shift in research praxis to focus on advancing liberation and creating a future environment free from oppression, trauma, violence, and discrimination. It is a political future that assumes humans have done the work to rid their communities of physical, discursive, and legislative violence. It is also a fictional future that strives to offer hope for those most marginalized. Thus, futurity studies exist beyond the horizons of our current constraints, center on the nuanced connections between the political present and the hopeful future, and thus require radical imagination to resist the idea that marginalized bodies are always already doomed.¹

“Radical imagination,” as defined by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, is the “socio-political possibility… of dynamic and shared visions animated by individuals and collectives as they struggle.”² Imagination helps us to define what could be in the future. In the pursuit of social justice, imagination plays an important role in the fundamentally political labor of redefining the social world. The word “radical” is concerned with deeper meanings, implying that we must look beyond answers on the surface and strive to uncover the reasons for our present realities. “The radical imagination [then] is not just about dreaming of different futures. It's about bringing those possibilities back from the future to work on the present.”³ Or in bell hooks' words, radical politics work to “eradicate domination and transform society.”⁴

In his groundbreaking text Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D. G. Kelley offers a historical outline of Black radical imagination in the United States that follows how Black intellectuals and freedom fighters envisioned freedom.⁵ He wanted to understand how radical thinkers imagined their life after revolution and where their ideas came from. He posed the question, “What kind of world [do] we want to struggle for?”⁶ Khasnabish and Haiven stated, “Imagination is a collective process rather than an individualized thing and emerges not from unique geniuses in their romanticized autonomy, but from communities and collectivities as they work their way through their world.”⁷ With this in mind, radical imagination is not the task of one person. It is something we do collectively to reimagine and build the future. As institutions and those in power change, so does the radical imagination. It is not constant; therefore, it cannot be singularly defined. Social movements, however, implicitly convoke radical imagination. To fight for change in the future that is unknown is to radically imagine the possible outcomes based on prior knowledge and learned experiences. Struggling for the world we want to live in is an exercise in both invoking the radical imagination and futurity, while also rebelling against determinacy.⁸

My (Amber) entrance into futurity and the Black radical imagination stems from Afrofuturism. Birthed from a nexus of social movement, technology, transnational capital, and artistic expression, Afrofuturism is an aesthetic manifestation of storytelling critically aware of possibility.⁹ Designed to project the mind and body into a future free from colonialism, Afrofuturistic artists, activists, and scholars look toward the critical embodiment of Afrocentric imagination in art forms such as film, music, visual art, fashion, and literature as a means of replacing presumed whiteness as authority. Afrofuturists argue that “a person's Black state of consciousness, released from the confining and crippling slave or colonial mentality, becomes aware of the multitude and varied possibilities and probabilities within the universe.”¹⁰ Within the refrain is a nod to history, institutional and political memory, the present, and the future. Afrofuturists rely on memory and history to inform the present in order to critically reimagine alternative futures.

While the language of Afrofuturism creates a level of unification that renders the critical imagination of blackness visible, the ways in which androgyny has been employed as a technological future create tension. Genderless and androgynous android narratives create a particular kind of gender freedom, or freedom from gender in futuristic imaginings, but not all bodies want to be genderless, and not all bodies can transgress into genderless embodiment due to various aesthetic, genetic, capitalistic, and/or cultural reasons. So what does a futurity that embraces non-normative sexualities and genders offer the radical imagination? Queer futurity pushes us to think through what it means for bodies to be free from the constraints of binary gender and heteronormativity, while also wrestling with the roles that memory, the present, and history play in the liberated future.

My (Benny) entrance into futurity is through queer futurity, which serves as an alternative and complimentary entrance point that tends to non-normative racialized sexual and gender identities with intention while wrestling with the future/present dichotomy. José Esteban Muñoz defines queer futurity as “a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity.”¹¹ Writing against the whiteness organizing dominant queer culture (i.e., “homonormativity”), including individualized articulations of “freedom,” Muñoz argued queer modes of relating (e.g., family of choice versus family of origin; other non-normative means of relating) serves as the ground for cultural transformation or worldmaking. This focus on the relational continues to serve as an important point of departure for critical communication research, particularly as it pertains to the embodied and mundane performance of survival as queer and trans subjects of color.¹² More specifically, queer futurities desire a queer relational ethic in the present that was never realized in the past. Though, Muñoz warns us of the false future/present dichotomy, arguing “against disappearing wholly into since ‘one cannot afford’ to simply ‘turn away from the present.’”¹³ Muńoz argues that the present demands our ethical considerations. The goal is not to recuse history or the present, but rather to use it a vantage point to understand intersectional power before and after catastrophe. Critics of campaigns like “It Gets Better” argue that focusing on the future too heavily diminishes the struggles of the current moment and reduces liberation to a time pinpointed to a horizon that, in reality for many queer and gender non-conforming people of color, may never be reached.¹⁴ However, Dustin Goltz's investigation into the “It Gets Better” campaign found that it offers a semblance of Muñozian perspective. Goltz argued that the campaign was successful at highlighting memory, the past, and the present by mapping queer futures through multivocality, internal contradiction, and a reimagining of what better might be for varying bodies within systems of intersectional power.¹⁵

Another campaign that reflects Muñoz's desire to be considerate of past and present while forging futures is ACT UP. Upon reflecting on ACT UP's 25th anniversary, Pascal Emmer calls for a “critical nostalgia,” or what James Clifford, interpreting Raymond William's, called “a way to break with the hegemonic present by asserting the reality of a radical alternative.”¹⁶ Emmer asks us to be critically nostalgic “regarding not just what histories we tell but how this very telling structures the rules of engagement between queer leftist generations.”¹⁷ Emmer argues for a “meta-generational approach to connecting ACT UP's past with the current AIDS movement, and the potential of a queer future, by recognizing the multiple histories and presents available as political resources.”¹⁸ Emmer goes on to suggest that “metagenerational work is urgently important because it constitutes an active and archival process; it interfaces past and present activist knowledges.”¹⁹

Both queer futurity and Afrofuturism rely on historical and personal memory to forge into potential. By replaying the constraints of the past but flipping them, memory bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography
• SECTION I Existence as Disruption
• SECTION II Identity Negotiation and Internal Struggles
• SECTION III The Erotic as a Site for Normative Disruption
• SECTION IV Queering History, Imagining Futures
• Index