In honor of the theme of this year’s University Press Week, we celebrate the ways in which university presses #StepUP, via their publications and collaborations, to present thought-provoking concepts, new points of view, and inspiring ideas, many of which advocate for social change. MSU Press journal QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking #StepsUP in every issue by bringing together scholars, activists, public intellectuals, artists, and policy and culture makers to discuss, debate, and mobilize issues and initiatives that matter to the diverse lived experience, struggle, and transformation of GLBTQ peoples and communities wherever they may be. MSU Press is proud to spotlight a recent special issue of QED: “Queer Healing and Transformative Justice.” This issue, which appeared in 2022 as volume 9, issue 3, explores concepts of queer healing and resistance in the face of violence, pandemics, incarceration, racism, and ableism. Below are links to read the introduction to the issue and some selected articles, which will be freely accessible for the next 6 months.
Introduction to “Queer Healing and Transformative Justice” by Alexia Arani and Anna Renée Winget
(Read on Project MUSE | Read on Scholarly Publishing Collective)
The COVID-19 pandemic and international protests of the violences of the prison industrial complex (PIC) have put matters of health, safety, and healing at the forefront of social justice struggles. Prison abolitionists around the world are asking: How do we dismantle systems of oppression foundational to carceral institutions within which and from which we find ourselves needing to heal? Or as Adaku Utah, Nigerian healer and liberation educator, prompts: how do we “create systems and structures that build wellness, safety, care, and power and depend less on the state and systems of violence? What do we need to transform in ourselves and in our organizations to build this kind of world?” (emphasis added) These questions—arguably more urgent than ever in the face of multiple pandemics, unmitigated police violence, and climate catastrophe—animate the articles, essays, poems, and speculative fiction that make up this special issue on queer healing and Transformative Justice. Our contributors, writing from a range of origins, locations, abilities, identities, and subject positions, demonstrate that the work of queer(ing) healing and reimagining how we prevent, disrupt, and intervene in harm is foundational to building abolitionist worlds, in the here and now.
“Entangled Genders: Unraveling Transformative Justice in the Early Childhood Classroom” by Dylan Brody
(Read on Project MUSE | Read on Scholarly Publishing Collective)
In contemporary discourses on transformative justice in education for gender diverse and trans youth, birth to three classrooms are often left out of the conversation. Yet mechanisms of carcerality, such as classism, racism, ableism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and xenophobia arise as children construct meaning through their primary method of exploration and learning: play. This article looks more deeply at the complexity of dismantling gendered violence in early childhood spaces, incorporating a liberatory praxis rooted in the work of Black queer feminism, queer theory, and early childhood scholarship. The following is a true story about my experience as a white, closeted, nonbinary trans teacher navigating transphobia with a white two-year-old student exploring gender in the classroom. The aim is not to provide scripted answers but rather to provide critical space to contemplate how we can assist in the healing process as we cultivate safer spaces for ourselves, our colleagues, our students, and their families.
“Research as a Practice of Collective Care and Resistance: A Roundtable Conversation with Transmasculine Health Justice: Los Angeles” by Sid Jordan, Cydney Brown, Ezak Perez, Gia Ryan Olaes Miramontes, Héctor Planscencia, Jaden Fields, Luckie Alexander, and Lylliam Posadas
(Read on Project MUSE | Read on Scholarly Publishing Collective)
Transmasculine Health Justice: Los Angeles (TMHJ:LA) is an initiative of Gender Justice Los Angeles, a grassroots organization led by and for trans, gender nonconforming, two-spirit, Black, Indigenous, People of Color. The organization’s mission includes resisting oppression, developing community responses to violence, and healing from present and historical trauma. TMHJ:LA was created in 2016 to use cultural arts and participatory action research to combat the erasure and invisibility of trans men and transmasculine people in public health planning and services in Los Angeles County. We began, and have since organized, as a majority transmasculine, queer, and Black, Indigenous, People of Color team of researchers, educators, community organizers, artists, and cultural workers. In the past five years, we have witnessed the increased politicization and monetization of “transgender health care” and a surge of transgender health-related research. Most public funding for research related to transgender health goes to efforts that are initiated and led by people without lived experience and with limited ties to trans-led social change organizing. TMHJ:LA started as a community-initiated organizing effort, situated within the leadership of a social movement organization with a broad vision for health justice. In this roundtable conversation, held in May 2021, a few of the creators of TMHJ:LA reflect on the work and some of the tensions and opportunities for organizing data projects on the principles of research justice and collective care.
“dear abled america” by Theresa Gao
(Read on Project MUSE | Read on Scholarly Publishing Collective)
In the poem, “dear abled america,” Theresa Gao links health care, education, media, and infrastructure as sites of ableist oppression and ruminates on leaving America “in search of freedom.”
“(in betweens of healing)” by Elias Bouderdaben
(Read on Project MUSE | Read on Scholarly Publishing Collective)
Elias Bouderbaden’s poetry collection tenderly traces the contours of hurt and healing, ruminating on spiritual praxis, cultural identity, and queer community as balms for diasporic loss and longing.
“A Tendr Scene: VR as Visionary Reality, Prototyping Radical Care and Queer Futurities” by G Yi
(Read on Project MUSE | Read on Scholarly Publishing Collective)
G Yi uses the medium of virtual reality to propose a paradigm for Activist Church, “a Disability Justice community center and house of worship, where people don’t try to heal me or where I have to hide who I am.”
Queer Behind the Wall: Prison Survival, Self-Love, and Community” by Alisha Kohn, Paris E. Whitfield, Kitty Rotolo, Brian Boles, and Jasmine K. Syedullah
(Read on Project MUSE | Read on Scholarly Publishing Collective)
Queer healing and Transformative Justice are thus deeply connected to embodying abolitionist futures; that is, living as if you are already free. In their conversation with Alisha Kohn, Kitty Rotolo, and Brian Boles, Paris E. Whitfield writes of the importance of staying true to oneself in the highly surveilled, punitive environment of the prison, where “the institution is designed to erase away every part of human individuality.” They argue that living in a space of fear and acquiescence, within a system that “seeks to stamp out ideas of Blackness, nonconformity, and queerness” can create an “internal prison, of sorts.” Kitty Rotolo advises on how to navigate this dual-incarceration, stating: “Just keep your head up and keep moving forward, flaunt your beauty, and it will keep you free on the inside” (emphasis added).