Afterword

Abstractions in International Relations: on the mystification of trans, queer, and subaltern life in critical knowledge production

“…For the volume’s editor, trans can be made to mean something other than itself, namely, the “heterotopic, multidimensional mobilities whose viral flows and circuits resist teleology, linearity, and tidy, discrete borders.” Once these qualities have been ascribed to the abstracted trans body, trans can become a heuristic device to analyze bodies that are “undergoing transit/ions other than gender—national, cultural, economic, and geographical migrations.” Further examples of this methodological deployment of trans abound. In a chapter entitled Trans-Gender, Trans-National: Crossing Binary Lines , migration scholar Emma Bond (2018) asks how “the various manifestations of the trans-body can function as a sign of disruption, of displacement, of being ‘out of place’” (p. 76). She writes that “the journey metaphor of transition” can help us rethink categories of confinement, traveling, and home (Bond, 2018), and that the experience of gender dysphoria can be “productively extended” (p. 76) to “open up new debates around belonging and orientation” (Bond, 2018: 72).…”

“…In a chapter entitled Trans-Gender, Trans-National: Crossing Binary Lines , migration scholar Emma Bond (2018) asks how “the various manifestations of the trans-body can function as a sign of disruption, of displacement, of being ‘out of place’” (p. 76). She writes that “the journey metaphor of transition” can help us rethink categories of confinement, traveling, and home (Bond, 2018), and that the experience of gender dysphoria can be “productively extended” (p. 76) to “open up new debates around belonging and orientation” (Bond, 2018: 72). Consider also the article “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?,” where Jessica Berman (2017) reads Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando as a “trans text” to refine our understanding of “transnational categories of belonging” (p. 218).…”

Contesting the Black Flâneur: The rhetoric of disruption and Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's urban literature

“…Equally as substantial as the role of urbanscape in Ali Farah's urban writings, is her extensive experimentation on the Black body, and more specifically, its mutilation, reduction, and reproduction, and its intricate interrelations with race and diaspora. In her Madre piccola , one of the protagonists, Domenica Axad's self-inscription becomes ‘a means of inscribing and achieving mastery of her relations with her parents and of her dual heritage identity’ (Bond, 2018: 52): while in Le stazioni della luna the connection between the two protagonists—Clara (a girl born to white Italian parents) and Ebla (a Black Somali wet nurse)—is wholly dramatized through breastfeeding experiences (Liu, 2022: 163). In a similar fashion, Yabar's existential crisis gestures toward a kind of Black phenomenology on bodily experiences.…”