Hi everyone! I’m the Conference Chair of Thinking Beyond: Transversal Transfeminisms. The combination of our personal trajectories and our professional positionalities is important to how we think and how do our scholarship, so I thought I’d introduce myself and some of the ideas that have fed into the organisation of our conference.
I was born and grew up in Oviedo, the capital city of the Principality of Asturias, an autonomous province in North-Western Spain famous for its coal mining, its bagpipes, and its fabada (i.e., a very heavy bean stew containing pork in all its various incarnations…). I’ve been living in the UK for most of the present century. I studied English Philology (a combination of English language, literature, and cultural studies) at the University of Oviedo (Spain). Taking my ERASMUS year (the EU’s version of the Year Abroad scheme) in 2003-2004 at the University of Leeds (UK) made me fall in love with postcolonial studies, while remaining interested in the authors I came to love in my teens, such as E. M. Forster. Postcolonial studies cemented my interest in issues of social justice in literature and culture, as well as my disposition to think across normative societal and scholarly barriers.
I became the typical case of the ERASMUS student who never went back… I spent an extra year at Leeds studying courses that would add to my credits in Spain and then went on to take an MA in Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies and a PhD in English Literature, both at the University of Leeds, where I worked under the excellent supervision of John McLeod. My PhD thesis explored Forster’s legacies in the fiction of Paul Scott, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, J. G. Farrell, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. After leaving the University of Leeds in 2011, where I taught a variety of courses on postcolonialism, Modernism, mid-twentieth century literature and culture, and American literature and culture, I taught for a while at the Universities of Edge Hill and York St John, while preparing my thesis for publication; this was eventually published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014 with the title of Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing: E. M. Forster’s Legacy, with a new chapter, born in part out of my discussion with my PhD examiners, on the work of Nadine Gordimer and Michael Ondaatje.
While preparing my monograph for publication in the summer of 2013, I almost fortuitously discovered the fiction of Moroccan writer and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa, the author of Salvation Army (which became a film written and directed by Taïa himself) and An Arab Melancholia, both autofictional works concerned with being a gay Muslim in both Morocco and Europe. My work on Forster and postcolonial fiction had already kindled by interest in Muslims and homoeroticism, although not necessarily put together. Taïa’s work was a definite revulsive in my thinking about queerness and Islam. During my stint at the University of Leicester, where I was a Teaching Fellow in Postcolonial Literature, my colleague and mentor Corinne Fowler helped me with my successful application for a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Corinne became my mentor for the project Queer Diasporas: Islam, Homosexuality, and a Micropolitics of Dissent (ECF-2014-067), which explored non-normative sexual orientations, Islam, and migration, in the literature and film of Hanif Kureishi, Ferzan Özpetek, Ian Iqbal Rashid, Shamim Sarif, Sally El Hosaini, Rolla Selbak, Abdellah Taïa, Rabih Alameddine, and Randa Jarrar. This study will be published by Manchester University Press later this year with the title of Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Literature and Film. In my work, I argue how necessary it is that we think about queer Muslims intersectionally; that we champion their Muslim identities and their queerness simultaneously, without falling into the traps of homonationalism or Islamophobia. I revised and finished my book during my first year in my current job as Lecturer in English Literature and the University of Roehampton. When I was waiting for hear back from the Leverhulme Trust, I became the Postgraduate and Early Career Representative for the Postcolonial Studies Association (UK). Since then, I have been elected its Vice-Chair.
Due to the fact I only had 3 years to carry out such an ambitious project on queer Muslims, I ended up being confined to an understanding of queerness on the lines of sexual orientation and, sometimes, gender presentation, and paired only with migration, without being able to consider indigenous national perspectives. Chairing an event at the British Library on contemporary queer Arab writing, I was introduced to the work of Jordanian playwright Amahl Khouri, especially their hilarious play She He Me. Amahl’s work opened my eyes to issues of Arab and Muslim trans and non-binary gender identities and how their national and diasporic creative production as queer people of colour and faith still needs to be broached academically from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. I’m currently putting together a project on these very lines, organised around the concept of transversality, but more on this soon…
Living in the Calder Valley, in Yorkshire, in the outskirts of Hebden Bridge, a progressive community known for its art, music, and queer non-conformity, I was troubled by transphobic incidents brought about by the recent consultation about the UK’s Gender Recognition Act. An ideological breach was revealed in our local lesbian community that was redressed with affirmative action, in order to send out the clear message that trans persons – and especially the trans women targeted – are an inalienable part of the queer community and of feminism. While our personal and individual experiences of gender and sexuality may be far from identical, we are all comparably invested in the challenge to heteronormative patriarchy that is common to most queer peoples, their allies, and even, at times, those who do not think of themselves as either queer or queer-friendly.
The idea that our identities and experiences may be distinct, while our political commitments overlap with those who are not exactly like ourselves, is linked to transversality. The notion of transversality, as variously developed in critical theory by the likes of Deleuze, Guattari, and Glissant, and more recently by Hwa Yol Jung, describes dynamics that cut across the identity groups posited by our societies, in a way that dissolves the extremes of essentialism and constructionism. It also involves movement, both physical and ideological, across spaces and cultures. In other words: we keep our identities; they can be deemed immanent and key to who we are; but we can also think beyond our own identities and connect with those different from us, sharing ideas and tools for dissent. I first thought of organising a discussion of transfeminism as transversal in the hope that it would spark a productive dialogue across identities, disciplines, and discourses.
As a cisgender gay man, as a postcolonial, queer, and diaspora scholar, I can see no hope for a juster or more inclusive future than in thinking beyond our partial perspectives by joining in, and learning from – and with! – those people with whom we share some very fundamental values despite our distinct identities. The commonality of our stories, I hope, can only grow in the telling. We may not be the same; we may not even agree on every single thing; but, after all, in Rosi Braidotti’s words: “‘We’ are in this together.”
transversal transfeminisms 