Trans linguacultures, trans logics:

Undoing cislingualism in educational contexts

Cite as: Knisely, K. (3 June, 2024). Trans linguacultures, trans logics: Undoing cislingualism in educational contexts. Presentation given as a part of the Towards Gender-Just & LGBTIQA+ Affirmative and Inclusive Language Teaching and Learning event for the Creating LGBTIQA+ Affirmative and Inclusive Language Teaching Practices initiative. University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus. Melbourne, Australia. (Hybrid).

Abstract: Nearly everything we do –as scholar-educators and as people– is bound up with the social and relational act of doing language. Our enlanguaged lives –and the very worlds we imagine possible– are constrained by cislingualism (i.e., the valuing of cisnormative cultures of language and the ideologies that inflect them). In this session we will engage with several distinctly trans approaches to language and linguistics, including exploring the ways that trans people actively draw on their full linguistic repertoires, regardless of how this might defy others’ ideas about tidy, appropriate, or expected ways of languaging (e.g., trans translanguaging in Knisely, 2023; consider also Flores, 2023, Kosnick, 2023, Zimman, 2021). Through this exploration, we will come to understand the role of trans epistemologies and enlanguagements in gender justice (e.g., language-as-social-verb, learning-as-participation, prefigurative politics, (in)effability, agency, undoing competence). In keeping, we will consider the limits of inclusionary approaches, the possibilities for coalition-and community-based capacity building, and the power of forms of gender-just education that honor and revel in trans linguacultures (i.e., trans cultures of language and the ways that trans cultures are enlanguaged). Open access resources will be provided to attendees.

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