Aiman Rahman, "The Mycelium of Liberatory Delights: Ross Gay’s Exploration of Black Joy"
Despite the impression rendered by popular stereotypes, the Black experience is much more capacious and abundant than trauma narratives. In this paper, I shall be exploring how Black joy operates as a radical act of self-preservation and defiance, tapping into the phenomena of pleasure activism, nonconsumptive delight, counter-narratives of representation, and the surge of reformative hope through the lens of Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. Gay challenges the idea of conflating pain with the Black experience by proclaiming his book as evidence of a Black creative’s potential to identify and produce beauty liberated from the entangled suffering enforced by white oppressors. My research will be backed up by Kleaver Cruz’s The Black Joy Project wherein he discovers the ‘double-bind’ nature of joy and grief, and Adrienne Brown’s Pleasure Activism wherein she examines the politics of healing and joy within social structures. I shall be probing how Black joy serves as a retaliatory mechanism for reclaiming Black Humanity in a world geared toward reducing Black communities to victims and overlooking their potential as agents of change. Consequently, these ‘delight-garnering rituals’ serve as methods of resistance in the face of anti-Blackness. I shall explicate how an alter order of compassion and tenderness can be laid down through the framework of Gay’s poetic amendments while also analyzing the way he goes against the grain of capitalism by advocating for an introspective, percolating pause. This paper hopes to unveil the ways Black people reimagine and re-envision their place in the world by radically and wholeheartedly embracing joy. I will examine how pleasure is not a signature of vanity or frivolity; it is freedom, especially for historically undermined groups for whom it was always inaccessible.
Avik Sarkar, "Possibility beyond the Present: Keioui Keijaun Thomas’s Black Trans Futures"
Anti-trans violence is nothing less than a global crisis. Tragically, it is well documented that Black trans women continue to be disproportionately targeted by fatal violence. In both the popular imagination and scholarly discourse, the Black trans woman is either located squarely in the past, where she has already passed (Marsha P. Johnson, for instance) or precariously in the present, where she is barely surviving. In other words, she is represented as a figure with no future, always dead or on the verge of death. As Dora Silva Santana reminds us, “there is a risk that… Black trans women are discussed only as a corpse” (215).
How might Black trans aesthetic practices reckon with this ongoing crisis? In my presentation, I will discuss visual and performance artist Keioui Keijaun Thomas’s project Come Hell or High Femmes: The Journey of the Dolls, which envisions a postapocalyptic world where only “the dolls”—Black trans women—remain. In her own words, Thomas investigates “camouflage and metamorphosis as modes of survival and transcendence,” strategies that allow the dolls to reproduce themselves from day to day. This speculative work challenges us to conceive of futures in which Black trans women can not only live but indeed flourish, beyond the persistent threat of premature death.
I will argue that Come Hell or High Femmes responds to José Esteban Muñoz’s call for “the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1). In the spirit of Muñoz’s reflections on utopia, Thomas refuses the precarity and violence that marks the present, transporting us instead to a space of abundance and pleasure, where Black trans femininity represents possibility as opposed to negation. She invites us not to ignore the current crisis but to consider what could—and should—come next.
Works Cited:
“Keioui Keijaun Thomas.” Wexner Center for the Arts, June 2022. https://wexarts.org/exhibitions/keioui-keijaun-thomas.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009.
Santana, Dora Silva. “Mais Viva!: Reassembling Transness, Blackness, and Feminism.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 2 (May 1, 2019): 210–22.
August Wei, "Queer Joy as Resistance: Reframing Transgender and Nonbinary Narratives"
Background: As the sociopolitical climate becomes increasingly hostile toward transgender and non-binary (TNB) individuals, celebration is an act of resistance. When research and media on TNB individuals is heavily focused on struggle and hardship, reframing TNB narratives to include joy is a necessary shift that demonstrates the complexities of the lived experiences of TNB people. In this proposed paper, we highlight the hope born out of crises and emphasize what is possible for TNB-centered research beyond documenting damage.
Aim: We aim to better understand how TNB individuals conceptualize the term and experiences of “queer joy”, including the contexts in which they experience queer joy. A secondary aim is to examine the impact of a queer joy brief expressive writing exercise on TNB individuals’ positive affect.
Method: We propose conducting a thematic analysis of written responses to prompts that assess understanding of and experiences with queer joy (e.g., “Think of a time when you experienced strong positive emotions (e.g., joy, happiness, euphoria) related to your sense of self as an LGBTQIA+ person.”; “Please define the term queer joy.”) A paired samples t-test will be used to compare positive affect prior to and after a queer joy brief expressive writing exercise. Data are from a TNB subsample of the International Queer Joy Survey (2023-2024), including 311 TNB participants residing in the United States and New Zealand (ages 16-71).
Discussion: This evidence of trans joy reflects a paradigm shift away from deficit-based TNB narratives and toward a growing literature base that accentuates the joyous resistance experienced by TNB individuals. In a period of anti-trans rhetoric, these results can radically inform how researchers, educators, and practitioners view and discuss TNB communities and their needs.
