(Institutional) Re/production

ABSTRACT

Reproduction as a social construct moves through people and institutions. As a result, people who are trapped in cycles of institutional violence may oftentimes be complicit in their furtherance, albeit without intent, malice, or blame. In some ways, those of us who are fetishized, commodified, and/or exoticized by institutional harm cannot help but be caught up in cyclical patterns of institutional harm. In this article, I detail my own personal narrative of this cycle, engaging memory work as a mode through which to remember and retell how institutional reproduction presses upon trans women. I then engage notions of freedom dreaming as one potential practice for imagining otherwises, elsewheres, and henceforwards unmarked by such reproductions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Here, it is worth noting transmisogyny is a part and parcel of the technology of whiteness. Building off the work of Black Feminist scholars (Collins, 1998; Davis, 1983; hooks, 2000), I assert that transmisogyny is in and of the very stuff of whiteness, an ideological core that holds together and props up various modes through which oppression operates. Or, as Stewart and Nicolazzo (2018) argued, transmisogyny is embedded in the ideological notion of whiteness as a container, with the container serving as “a useful metaphor to understand how white supremacy holds many disparate threads of oppression together to consolidate power and further the project of white racial hegemony” (p. 135). In this way, transmisogyny here can be understood to be intimately linked to, furthered by, and fueling to other modes of oppression, including compulsory ablebodiedness (McRuer, 2006), which is itself deeply connected to my argument. Also, I find it important to articulate transmisogyny in its singularity here so as to underscore how violence, threat, and harm are meted out against trans women. This is not to say it is “only about” transness, or that transmisogyny is somehow disconnected from other forms of domination; however, it is to say that transness, as a leading edge of my argument, can be named so as to call readers’ attention to its importance, while also recognizing its embeddedness in a broader technology of whiteness that creates epistemological ←→ ontological threat, harm, and violence for many (multiply) marginalized populations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Z Nicolazzo

Z Nicolazzo, Ph.D. lives and works on the ongoing and unceded lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui peoples. Her work focuses on discourses of gender in education, transmisogyny as a mode of institutional capture, and grief and loss.