Languaging a postdiscipline: Insights from teaching trans cultures of language

Kris Aric Knisely
Presentation at the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference

Abstract: Trans ways of knowing, being, and doing defy borders and binaries, be they the rigid disciplinary categorizations that isolate trans scholars from one another in the academy or the normative linguistic boundaries that artificially isolate trans languagers (i.e., people who do the social, relational act of language) from one another in the broader world. Scholars of language have demonstrated the ways that trans people actively draw on their full linguistic repertoires and find inspiration in trans cultures of language the world over, 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). Applied to language education, this has meant questioning foundational (read: cisheteronormative) assumptions about what language is and what happens when we attempt to teach and learn this social, relational act through which we constantly (re)make our worlds. But we don’t just language in contexts of language education: Language is a part of near every social –and scholarly– exchange. 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 keeping, this presentation considers how coalition- and community-based, capacity-building approaches to gender-just language education can contribute to trans studies as an increasingly collaborative postdiscipline and how these contributions might support our work to prefigure a more liveable academy and world for us all.