[vc_section css=”.vc_custom_1579170657650{margin-top: 20px !important;margin-right: 20px !important;margin-bottom: 20px !important;margin-left: 20px !important;border-top-width: 1px !important;border-right-width: 1px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;border-left-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 0px !important;padding-right: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;padding-left: 0px !important;border-left-color: #000000 !important;border-left-style: solid !important;border-right-color: #000000 !important;border-right-style: solid !important;border-top-color: #000000 !important;border-top-style: solid !important;border-bottom-color: #000000 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;border-radius: 1px !important;}”][vc_row fullwidth=”has-fullwidth-column”][vc_column padding_left=”30px” offset=”vc_col-lg-12″][vc_empty_space height=”40px”][agni_section_heading heading=”Listening for Trans* Latinx Lives” heading_size=”40″ divide_line=””][vc_empty_space height=”40px”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row fullwidth=”has-fullwidth-column” content_placement=”top” border_top=”1″ border_color=”#000000″ border_style=”solid”][vc_column width=”1/6″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]AM Medina
University of California, San Diego
PhD Student in Integrative Studies
“Y’all better quiet down!” yells trans Latina activist, thinker, and organizer Sylvia Rivera at a 1973 Gay is Good rally in New York City. But, who is the “y’all” that Rivera is addressing? A mostly cis, white, middle-class, gay and lesbian audience booing and screaming at Rivera before her speech, a speech where she lashes out against the apathy of this audience for not attending to the needs of queer and trans people in prison who have been beaten and raped. In his analysis of the video, performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz writes that “[Rivera] paces the stage in a relentless fashion…. The camera momentarily shifts to the audience of assembled queers, who are first attempt to shout her down…but she is unrelenting. She will not cede the stage; she will not be silenced,” (Muñoz 2020:131, my emphasis). Rivera is asserting her presence at the rally through a sonic interjection; refusing the boos from audience members who do not want a trans Latina organizer to speak to them, she demands to be listenened to. In this way, listening to trans Latinidades is something that is not a polite request to be understood by an audience, but rather an urgent call to respond to the political needs of those who face racialized and gendered discrimination.
In my work, I identify this urgency within a broader call for a trans of color sound studies, that is, a trans of color mode of approaching sound—an analytic of sound that does not hear it as hermeneutically altered by race and gender, but rather deals with the ontological formation of race and gender that creates the concept of sound itself. This mode of approaching sound as way of listening for trans Latinx lives does not assume a level of “inclusion” of trans of color subjectivity into the broader literature in sound studies. Trans of color sounds, performances, or voices—although rich resources for producing critical thought—cannot simply exist as objects of study for sound studies scholars to pull from to enhance or diversify our work. By this, I mean that doing the work of trans of color sound studies does not add trans of color figures to syllabi or archives but rather I suggest we “quiet down” to listen to the urgency of trans of color political needs; needs that seek to assert life in an overwhelming presence of death and violence. Drawing from Ashon Crawley’s definition of Black Study (which, in his framework, is separate from Black studies departments in universities), defining it as a “mode of approaching objects”—objects that are not simply static for receiving a “reading” but that are themselves agentive in theorizing—we might be able to understand a trans of color mode of approaching sound and demanding from it a path towards liberation from violence.
One such way that I mobilize a trans of color mode of approaching sound is to take a radical approach to listening. Listening allows for multiple possibilities of experience, a sort of multivalence. Jean-Luc Nancy notes that “to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible,” (2007: 6). Going further, he writes that “To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning…a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only in resonance,” (Nancy 2007: 7). In a trans of color sound studies, listening becomes one of the tactics that allow us to extend and manipulate time to our advantage, even in states of precarity that might deny us the certainty of the everyday. To make the present more present, listening allows for a study in sound that deals with the particular…the peculiar. Listening urgently searches for meaning in trans of color resonance, a meaning that is sensed more than objectively “known”. As a way of disrupting, selecting, and lingering, listening allows us to disrupt trans of color necropolitics in a way that seeks life. Christina Leon and Joshua Javier Guzman describe how “Lingering as a verb demands a kind of languor, a dwelling that inhabits the spaces of ambivalence and ambiguity,” (2016:271). Trans of color sound studies might use radical forms of listening to assert life in a seemingly overwhelming presence of death.
One way in which we might perform a radical listening for trans Latinx life is through a framework of “mais viva,” that Dora Silva Santana discusses. Translating from Brazilian Portuguese to being more alive, more alert, and savvier, Santana uses this framework to talk about the potential for Black trans feminism in a way that doesn’t seek to “trans” Afro-Latinidad or “racialize” transness, but instead to point toward a way that finds solidarity in the fugitivity of both. In Santana’s words:
…It means “being-alive-savvy,” it is not just being alive but more alive; it is transitioning in the world by transcending, trans-ing life. Being mais viva becomes the outcome and a condition to resist death. (Santana 2019: 216).
Santana’s concept of mais viva, in my opinion, clarifies a distinctly trans position to Muñoz’s assertion that “we must insist on a queer futurity because the present is so poisonous and insolvent,” (2009:30). Denied the everyday, as trans of color subjects are under necropolitical regimes of death, new theoretical frameworks (such as mais viva) are necessary for establishing the conditions of our existence in which utopia is possible. Mais viva refutes the quagmire of the present in an alternative way, focusing on a sense of urgency in the present itself, transing time for trans of color futurity. Such futurity is afforded by radical forms of listening that seek to relocate utopia by sitting with the aesthetic.
In trans of color sound studies, I ask: can we find utopia in the present? By listening, lingering, and through mais viva, can we not disrupt the weight of necropolitical regimes of death on our existence? To make the present more present is to demand mais viva from sound. Where the state craves silence through the maintenance of a necropolitical death world, I listen. I listen against the necropolitical, its desire to destroy and forget, as a form of solidarity. Sound won’t stop trans Latinxs from being killed, but in that moment of disappointment we can listen and linger, making sure that those who have been murdered do not stay dead, and are given their chances at mais viva in the present.
These modes of listening as care and mais viva that I am outlining within a trans of color sound studies does not limit itself to thinking through a mediated sonic past, but can also be used as a framework for understanding the care and community trans Latinas create in the present. One night at a dive bar in San Diego (which just happened to be El Grito, Mexico’s independence day), I was approached by Jamie, a trans woman who introduced me to mis hermanas trans—trans Latinas who upon recognizing my transness embraced me and took me in to sit at their table. All night emborrachamos, chismeando, y abrazándonos. One of my hermanas played a recording of “Paloma Negra” on the electronic jukebox, and in our little corner table, mis hermanas y yo sang like we were Jenni, or Chavela, or Lola, or whoever—pero como hermanas. “Quiero ser libre/vivir mi vida/ con quien yo quiera,” we sang to each other, locking a gaze of hermandad (sisterhood). In that moment we were activating a performative listening, a form of sonic attention and care that recognizes the liveliness (the potential for mais viva) of one another through our voices. By singing to one another in hermandad, we iterate a trans Latinx listening and mode of approaching sound that shapes us; we become the trans Latinas that we are by listening through the facultades of our hermanas.
Queer and feminist Chicana writer Gloría Anzaldúa describes la facultad (the ability) as “the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see deep structure below the surface… It is is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak,” (1987:47). La facultad is a way of sensing and being “excrutiatingly alive to the world,” a deep internal vibration that comes from being attuned to danger, violence, loneliness, and transition (Ibid.). I think of la facultad as a driving affect, a hum in those who have embodied and generational trauma, and a strategy for preventing more harm—which ultimately becomes a form a consciousness that opens you to being able to care for the other (your hermana). What if we were to think of la facultad as a theory of listening? Listening with la facultad goes deeper than music, sound, or the voice, deeper than its “grain” that Barthes locates as its semiotic; la facultad, as a way of listening como hermanas, opens up a deep relationality and internal resonance that is the mode of care and urgency Santana calls for in mais viva. Listening with la facultad makes us “quiet down,” to hear the trauma that Sylvia Rivera tells us she and our other hermanas have faced. As Anzaldúa and Santana both make apparent, these forms of being and consciousness are first survival strategies, epistemological and ontological theories that are necessary in a world that is cruel and unjust.
In this way, I do not take the task of trying to articulate my listening in hermandad—a sonic facultad in order to produce mais viva—lightly; it is fundamentally a task of positing a sound studies that counteracts the overwhelming violence that trans Latinxs face. I demand a sound studies that listens to the hermanas that have been imprisoned, beaten, raped, and murdered, to the ones who never got to transition, and to the ones who hold me together today. It is a monumental task and calling to care for trans Latinx sonorities in a way that moves towards consciousness and being that sustains hermandad. A sonic, trans, Latinx hermandad is one where you are no longer you, but held in the resonance of your hermanas; listening for trans Latinx life requires an opening of the self with la facultad as a way to embrace and be embraced by your hermanas.
1. This recording can be found on YouTube here: L020A Sylvia Rivera, “Y’all Better Quiet Down” Original Authorized Video, 1973 Gay Pride Rally NYC
2. Translation: I want to be free/to live my life/with whomever I want.
References
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, fifth edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Butler, Judith. “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion.” In Bodies That
Matter: On The Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge, 1993.
Guzman, Joshua Javier and Christina Leon. “Cuts and impressions: the aesthetic work of lingering in
Latinidad.” Women and Performance 25, no. 3 (2016): 261-276.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
—The Sense of Brown. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Santana, Dora Silva. “Mais Viva! Reassembling Transness, Blackness, and Feminism.” Transgender
Studies Quarterly 6, no. 2 (2019): 210-222.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/6″][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]