Featured Event | June 23: Tozzer Library Pride Talk
Announcing the return of Tozzer Library’s Pride Talk! Please feel free to attend virtually at Noon, Friday June 23rd.
*Please note that this event has been postponed from its original 6/20 schedule.
Undoing Empire Through Transmasculinities: Dispatches from the Lone Star State
Please join Tozzer Library as we present our 2023 Pride Talk with Xitlalli Alvarez Almendariz on this Friday, June 23rd at 12:00 EST.
In 2023 transgender people face the cascading impacts brought on by a behemoth of anti-trans legislation across different states in the settler US. Paired with eliminationist rhetoric, this latest wave of policy attempts to normalize and codify transphobia in the public sphere. Especially in the south, these attacks have already displaced young people and their families, triggering trans migration from states like Florida, Arkansas, and Texas. Far more others refuse to concede ground. Trans healthcare bans join abortion bans as pieces of the policing structure erected to chip away at bodily autonomy for racialized people of marginalized genders. In the words of the treasured trans elder Miss Major, “Stonewall never happened.” Amid these battles, transmasculine people have frequently been the subject of the right’s moral panic and a main target in their strategy to further entrench bioessentialism in the state and its enforcement(policing) machinations. As one transphobic traveling “expert” with the conservative Manhattan Institute implied under the dome of the Texas Capitol: transmasculine transitions represent a unique dis/order. This talk will explore how transmasculinities, especially racialized transmasculinities, destabilize the order of an empire rooted in its regional colonial histories.
Xitlalli (he/they) is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard, an organizer, and a student of abolitionist presence and vision. His research focuses on colonialism/disaster, policing, and (trans)genders in the Texas Gulf Coast.