Our bodyminds are mycellium networks, tender gatherings of rebellious, engaged stories. We are changemakers who manifest trans, queer, crip of color dreams for our collective liberation. “Searching for Euphoria: Bodies as Resistance” centers our bodyminds as sources of wisdom, as verb. Each of our panelists will explore how, when we are guided by our intersectional bodyminds, by feminist, queer, crip theory as defined by Alison Kafer, by Critical Race Theory, and by a Black feminist love practice as named by bell hooks and Sonya Renee Taylor, we can change the future of our communities. How can we embrace and be guided by the euphoria of our bodyminds? How can we transform ableist notions of pleasure and embodiment?
Performing Queer, Disabled of Color by Shayda Kafai
The embodied and enminded wisdom work of Sins Invalid, a Bay-Area based performance project, centers the wisdom, activism, and artmaking of disabled, chronically ill, queer, gender nonconforming, trans folks of color. Through performance art, workshops, and Disability Justice movement-building work, Sins Invalid urges that our bodymind stories hold the potential shift oppressive, intersecting networks of ableism, cis-heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. This presentation explores the ways our disabled, queer of color bodyminds carry lessons for our collective survival, how we–in all our infinite wisdoms–can create methods for us to thrive. What activist lessons come from disabled, queer of color bodyminds outward? How can performance serve as a space where these lessons are communicated?
Radical Trans Joy: Gender Euphoria from the TBIPOC Community by Liz Gerena
In a culture that privileges dysphoria, to me, gender euphoria is wearing an all pink outfit after years of despising pink for making me look too feminine; it is the small hairs under the bottom of my chin from taking testosterone. It is my voice dropping. Although I did not experience gender dysphoria for many years, contrary to the normative trans narrative, it was gender euphoria that taught me to celebrate my transness. This project amplifies the benefits of gender euphoria and most importantly, explores how we can dismantle the myth that gender dysphoria is the normative trans narrative. How many people are having a similar journey, of discovering their transness through their gender euphoria instead of their gender dysphoria? How many people are learning to fall in love with their transness after years of only focusing on their gender dysphoria?
To Queer and To Crip: The Euphoria of Change by Erin Masters
In many spaces, we are bombarded with rigid “norms” rooted in racism, patriarchy, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and capitalism, and we must find ways to queer and crip the world around us. We as crip, chronically ill, Mad, trans, gender-expansive, queer, people of color find ways to interrogate and deconstruct the oppressive norms that surround us. We search for euphoria by cripping and queering our world and our spaces, making home for our bodyminds and building community. We find that we are not alone, we can create and change our spaces, we can crip and queer our worlds together. We are meant to find joy and while the world tries to prevent our joy, our love, our euphoria, our spaces are meant for us and the world cannot take that away.
Not Our Bodies/Fragments: Mini Pieces Into a Life I’ve Never Known by Aja Solis
Mini Pieces Into a Life I’ve Never known is about the life I have come to know which is a funny thing to say because my life as I knew it was not how I wanted it to be. Therefore, this project is meant to open up the conversation regarding the struggles of how non-binary/trans folk are forced to live inside categorizations and labels. Without mentioning the process (the process of dysphoria and displacement), I provide a lens that is vulnerable, intimate, and distorted in hopes that those reading my work can find a place to feel at home outside of a space that was once limitless; because in order to break away from these confinements, we must do what is not expected of us.
liminal bodies, digitized touch: transmasculine navigators through eroticized digital space by James Aubreii
Cisnormative discourse pervades our existence in ways that validate the ostracization, abjection, mutilation, fetishization, and commodification of bodies that live outside the borders of binary sex. The intersex trans body is transgressive; it is a force that can and should disrupt the orderly oppression of normalcy and conformity. There should not be an "ideal" trans body. To be trans is to willingly enter into the liminal, to inhabit a bodymind that is Other and ephemeral. There is joy to be found when we shed the expectations of society's cruelly and mundanely fashioned reality. These bodies that continue to evolve and shift on the edges of the tangible need a place to stage their revolution, and this can potentially be found within the digital space. In digital spaces, communities of thought can thrive in ways that are more accessible, safe, diverse, and widespread. While ideological scrutiny and capitalist data mining has sought to destroy these spaces, there will always be pockets of resistance. My work aims to cultivate transqueer digital resistance that centers the euphoria of diversity in phenotypic sex expression.
