Laughing Our Way to Liberation: The Radical Politics of Trans Joy

• In Event: Queer and Trans Politics in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

As trans visibility has grown in recent years, so too has backlash. Trans people are facing relentless and accelerating attacks worldwide, with particularly rapid escalation in the US and UK. This comes not despite but through democratic political institutions: every year since 2021 has surpassed the prior as the worst recorded year for anti-LGBT legislation in the US. Many trans people are afraid, and for good reason. Yet we are also finding ways to move forward together. In the shadows of a social and political climate seemingly bent on our erasure, we curate space for pleasure. Rather than focusing on anti-trans movements and legal responses thereto, this paper turns its attention to these joyous affective undercommons (Harney and Moten, 2013) and argues that trans joy and the modes of intra-community care it facilitates offer under-examined tools for enacting and maintaining trans futures.

Working through an intersectional lens and drawing on queer and feminist theory, affect theory, original interview research, and auto-ethnography, I first introduce trans joy as a political affect. By integrating Spinoza’s concept of Joy as that which increases our capacity to act with the more colloquial meaning of joy as pleasure, trans joy holds immense political potential. First, and in contrast to hope or utopianism, joy’s present-focused temporality can tie into and fuel aspirations for a different future but is not dependent on such a belief or future outcomes. It is similarly not reliant on the “right” conditions for its enactment; even in the darkest moments, there can be joy. In addition to this usefully present-oriented, prefigurative dimension, joy as a relational and energizing political affect responds to the alienating and disempowering effects of fear and sadness as tools of White cisheteropatriarchy. Trans joy laughs in the face of the despair that is integral to maintaining extant hierarchies of power. Finally, joy as political affect expands the aims of trans politics. As Black and Indigenous feminists have long proposed, with joy comes a demand for a future filled with abundance and pleasure, not merely survival. Such a shift entails deeper, more radical demands for change. This paper concludes by introducing the larger project of which it is a part, which suggests that trans care and joy together may offer a prefigurative politics of trans liberation.

Author

• Addye Susnick, University of British Columbia