In Transgender Studies Quarterly, Francisco J. Galatre (2014) suggests that transpedagodies should “offer students the tools they need to participate in the political and economic power structures that shape the boundaries of gender categories, with the goal of changing those structures in ways that create greater freedom” (146). Recognizing the liberatory potential of education, while at the same time being cautious of its function as a surveillance apparatus, Galatre’s writing on pedagogy and subsequent co-edited issue with Z. Nicolazzo and Susan B. Marine offer an important opportunity to think through the intersections of gender socialization, Western education, and Eurocentric knowledge production.
This teaching dossier focuses on how transpedagogies can specifically offer tools to engage with trans cultural production in media-based classrooms and beyond. We think critically of the politics of trans media production which, as recent scholarship illustrates, is indelibly shaped by debates about visibility and visuality, often over-centred through whiteness (Carter et al. 2014; Rosskam 2014; Steinbock 2019). The discursive ‘trap’ of hypervisibility and invisibility scholars describe is especially salient for trans producers of colour, who have pointed out the simultaneity of the co-option of racialized creative labour and erasure of racialized lives in media cultures (Gossett, Stanley, and Burton 2017). In the classroom, this tension can translate itself as an overuse of “accessible” trans media (whitewashed and appropriated) and the very real erasure of racialized trans lives and creativity.
