Towards a grey analytic: a travesti proposal for liberation
“Travesti is the refusal to be trans, the refusal to be a woman, the refusal to be intelligible”
- Malu Machuca Rose
Woman versus man, black versus white, good versus evil, global North versus global South, us versus them – the world is categorized and put into binaries; this is by design: it supports the patriarchal, capitalistic, and white supremacist agenda by alienating each other through the different racial, social, sexual, and geographical (along with many others) categories. Even as I write this, I am placing myself in the “us” (we are subjugated to these world formations, we are left powerless) and by so doing, removing my complicity to the Law of this world[1]. Let me preface by saying that in what follows I will say, refer, or imply to the notion of “us,” but in no way do I mean an us that is opposite to them. I claim full responsibility in my contributions and complicity to the Evils and Powers that be, while also being subject to them. Yes, you can be both. I am writing this from the experience of being in a woman’s body, of being short, of being a daughter, of being Mexican, of being American, of having light skin, of being brown, of being queer, of being the daughter of colonizers, of being the daughter of people native to the land; of being in the border; of being in the grey.[2]
In what follows, and with the above-mentioned in mind, I will expand on Marlene Wayar’s nostredad and the gerund, with and from the framework of greyness, with a desire to move towards liberation[3].
The central idea of a travesti-trans Latin American teoría denotes the possibility of exercising critical thinking that allows for the building of a better world, more just and equal. For travesti-trans Latin American theory, humanity is a “reality centered around hetero man-woman systems” (my translation, Wayar, 25) that only generates death and violence. This humanity produces a violence and expulsion of any childhood that does not conform to the heterosexual families. Wayar remarks “no queremos más ser esta Humanidad” (25). From their own childhood registers, travestis question this humanity and reject it, fighting against the State: “con nuestros saberes maricas, tortas y travas infantes ponemos en crisis la piedra nodal del sistema heterosexual, la responsabilidad de las funciones paterno-maternales. Nadie nace como pertenencia de papa y mama” (26). A State that does not involve itself in those father-mother responsibilities is nothing but a political failure of society, Wayar states, because such care requires time, love, and most of all, hugs.
In Una Teoria Lo Suficientemente Buena, Marlene Wayar introduced a “nostredad” (18) to describe the possibilities of identity formation in la niñez, or childhood. Wayar proposes nostredad as a way of subject and identity formation from the point of implicating oneself in the world, without distance. Wayar highlights the urgency of this theory given the loss of the “conciencia de que somos seres reproductivos, que producimos subjetividad” and ends with: “es esta una teoria en construccion, lo suficientemente buena como para despertar conciencias que se sumen a la acción reproductiva de subjetividades capaces de empatizar con la otredad” (18). By asking questions about how we are raising our children, how we are educating them, and how we are loving them, the travesti-trans teoria she proposes directs us to a critique of the heterosexual family narrative through the figure of the Child. Wayar explains that childhood is a space and time where nostredad can develop because a child does not take a subjectivity always in opposition to the Other. She notes that it is through play that children shape, transform and identify themselves. They are much more open to mutual empathy because they have not been severed by the adult world thus the fears still give in and makes way for nostredad. From this, Wayar lets us know that she is not here to say what it’s like to be travesti, but instead encourages us to finding the trans in ourselves starting with our own registers and experiences of our childhood.
By asking the questions of how we are raising our children, Wayar places emphasis on the heterosexual normative family formation and asks us to consider what our education system is doing and how we care for children. Like Wayar, I believe that childhood is crucial in developing empathy, however I would like to note the similarities between what one can experience during childhood and what I would like to propose as a sense of greyness, or greyness as a way of being. Nostredad, in this grey sense, becomes a subjectivity that is everywhere (and everything) in the world. The distance is gone because you are at every distance. A grey nostredad carries empathy but more than that, it is the erasure of boundaries between my body and your body, my body and the table I use to write this[4]. This is not a metaphor. This multitudinal positionality needs to be understood with the pain and responsibility of the world at large. The grey that I would like to propose is not an erasure as we often see with the “we are all one” neo-liberal progressive rhetoric. No, this is not an erasure. In fact, it is a position of excess: it is a cuir position. This is to say that greyness encompasses a multiple way of being and moving through the world.
I have developed this greyness positionality through an extensive material research of paper. More specifically, of discarded and trashed documents from my community in West Philadelphia. Paper, in its materiality, has the capacity to hold one’s life and identification. We see a line of people outside the immigration office, and they all hold a folder with filled-out forms asking for asylum, or a new life, in the US. They all stand in line with their lives in their hands. I go to the doctor’s office and write down the medical history of my family tree. In my paper research, I needed to collect paper so I posted a message on the local neighborhood Facebook group asking for paper; any kind is fine, give me your trash, I asked. A flood of notifications and messages came to my phone. Tons of newspaper, magazines, a huge bag of documents from someone’s aging mother. She didn’t need those anymore – you do not need documents when you are dust. We write on paper and use it to sustain the project of modernity. The dying mother is suddenly in the black plastic bag I have in my hand.
figure 1. Sunbathing at the edge of the tongue (La Buena Fama soñando), 2021.
The process for making paper is simple. To make a new sheet of paper, you only need to gather the discarded paper (read: lives, bodies) and put them in a blender with sharp blades. This process might be painful. After, pour the blended pulp on a mesh screen. The water excess will seep through the mesh and after some added pressure, the mash of lives will again become paper. This process is repeated over and over, combining lives, combining histories. The new paper will hold new stories and will encounter new deaths. It will fall apart (this is part of its ontology) and it will come back together. You just need to blend it.
Sunbathing at the edge of the tongue (figure 1) is an artwork I produced through the framework of greyness. Using the jersey barrier as a signifier, I recall the instability of man-made borders and use the ephemeral material of paper to subvert its supposed, forced authority. The entire structure is covered in collected and recycled paper: with a grey nostredad. The barrier takes hold of the stories of the people in West Philadelphia, along with mine, and brings them together in the shape of what is used for crowd control in protests, at the US-Mexico border, in war zones to “protect” against bomb attacks; it marks the distance between you and me. But it is paper and it is a tunnel. It will fall apart and there are many tunnels under a border.
It is through recognizing the multiplicity and complexities in identity formation that we can access care and liberation. The nostredad that Wayar finds in la niñez, a space when children can develop empathy because they haven’t been yet affected by the predicaments of the world. But more importantly, I want to focus on the space that allows for an identity formation that implicates the subject in the world: there is no distance, the distance is gone and you are in the world. This is how I’m understanding Wayar’s nostredad and this is also where greyness is found.
Greyness recognizes that I am both the colonizer and the colonized. I do not mean to imply a magical notion of the mestizo as a new race or as a savior race[5]. Instead, I acknowledge that I am mestiza but I do not exist between two (or made out of two), rather I go beyond, past the categories, because the categories do not hold me. Because categories are a colonizing tool and they fix the world. They kill the world. They killed our ancestors and they killed our land. But it is through this mestizaje that I become unfixed: my identity is ever-changing, but more importantly, it cannot be pinned-down.
There is a question here about the field of queer studies in the Global North. Without categorization itself, the field includes a wide range of socialities and humanities. But since I am proposing a travesti proposal, I will focus on knowledge production outside of the Academia, to include and recognize all of those who have worked to develop an understanding of the travesti self. This is to say that I am prioritizing alternative forms of knowledge like the experiences of those around me that identify as such, as well as my own; and the work of activists, scholars, and thinkers in the Global South both within and outside of the institution. It is also important to note that the analytic that I am proposing here is expansive and is meant to encompass the world at large, so that we may expand our understanding of queerness, of travesti, and of finding joy through death.
In Una Teoria lo Suficientemente Buena, Wayar highlights the gerund and describes it as a mode of (currently) being . She rejects normative ways of identifying and describes that they are limiting in the sense that they fix you in place, through time and space. Instead, she talks about the gerund and about being right now. She says she is being, que va siendo, travesti – not tomorrow, not yesterday – no, right now, ella va siendo travesti. And with that I understand that she is nowhere and she is everywhere. She is in the world and she is in herself, simultaneously implicating herself and claiming her responsibilities, and also understanding her own subjectivities and marginalized identities. This is a powerful mode of being: to exist in time, at multiple times, to exist on the line of time and to move with it. To rest at a point in time that moves across times.
Similarly, the horseshoe crab lives across time. At any given moment, it is both itself and something else. It is both here, and there.
The horseshoe crab is a species of animal that has survived multiple Great Extinctions and Ice Ages. There are four different species: three live in Asia and Southeast Asia, often differentiated by the name of “mangrove,” and one lives in the Delaware Bay. The horseshoe crab has been existing since before the dinosaurs inhabited the Earth, about 450 million years ago. They have had no significant evolutionary change since they became living on this earth. So, they are called a living fossil. And they are studied to understand other species that are now extinct. They are a window to time 450 million years ago.
The horseshoe crab exists in time almost half a billion years ago and they also exist in time a month ago when I was quarantining in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I was walking along the beaches in front of the Tropicana casino hotel. The night before a full moon, there, about 20 to 30 horseshoe crabs laid dead. Dismembered. In the massacre, I also found the mutilated bodies of two fishes and one bird. Debris.
Now: the horseshoe crab also exists right now, inside, everywhere. The horseshoe crab has copper-rich blue blood that is harvested to develop human vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccine. Though the blue blood isn’t inside us, if I take the position of grey nostredad, the bled-out crabs are inside my body.
A violence that reveals itself in the lack of love, in the absence of hugs, in the rejection, in the hate, in the punishment and in the deaths. In one paragraph Claudia Rodriguez asks what to do with the rage, with the resentment accumulated over so much violence and hatred received. Wayar answers her, “yo tengo un cementerio en la cabeza, no tengo noción de cuantas compañeras y amigan han muerto y todas muertes tristes, espantosas y evitables” (31). Then, Wayar explains that matter has memory and that it breaks in the same place it broke the first time: she talks about ceramics and talks about her body that remembers. At the same time, she politicizes that pain and fear, and affirms that they (travestis) can fight and involve themselves politically because lo trava is the possibility of encounter. To politicize the pain in the body, and to use the pain as a form of knowledge and power.
When talking about human rights, Wayar mentions that the first thing to remember is that we are reproductive beings, and because of it, care is crucial. She asks us to “produce a society that hugs itself” (my translation, 101), a society that makes time to hug their children. From the margins, from a life of death and violence, from a life of excess there lies a teoria against the heterosexual, normative, patriarchal, capitalistic, and racist State. The travesti body is an active site of resistance and of fight. It is because of this, that I recognize and acknowledge the work of generations before me that have fought against the Law and Powers of the world.
Taking into consideration Wayar’s work on travesti-trans Latin American teoria, I situate the greyness analytic in the space of a shared nostredad and of being in multiple times. The grey nostredad is a recognition of all the other stories before me and the world at large. Like paper, we exist together, in each other’s stories and above sharp blades. We have already died and we are already something Other. Like this paper, we also exist here, now, then. In a time that is never backward or forward but simply another point. We as fragments exist there and then, right now. We, as fragments, already exist not in three points but in every point. We live in Wayar’s gerund, estamos siendo. Without fixing, there is instability, but we live in an unstable world, and to categorize it is to destroy it. We exist in the dusk because in the dusk there are no shadows. There are no shadows and there is no other: no light, no lines. There are no shadows under a shadow. The shadows can hide you and protect you. The shadow will cover you with the veil of opacity and illegibility. Often, the shadow will also become a stage for transformation. That is the monochrome. That is greyness.
A space where there are no shadows. A time when there are no shadows. Because I am, through my fragments, at every point, every time, every where.
Works Cited
Wayar, Marlene, and Susy Shock. Travesti: Una teoría Lo Suficientemente Buena. Editorial Muchas Nueces, 2019.
[1] Here, I mean that I am recognizing that I an accomplice: see Marlene Wayar in Una Teoria Lo Suficientemente Buena, (2018).
[2] This list of the “beings” I am coming from could be the entire length of this essay, so I have only included a few of my beings in the interest of brevity. In short, I could describe the experience from which I’m writing this to be an experience of being many.
[3] I am using the word liberation with the work of Indigenous and Black activists, scholars, and neighbors in mind. I am proposing a broader understanding of queer studies and identification for a cuir understanding of the world.
[4] I use boundaries to refer to the physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries we all exist within. See also: Hildyard, D. (2020) and Kastrup, B. (2017).
[5] See Vasconcelos, J. La Raza Cosmica (1925)
