UC San Diego

This thesis is an attempt at trying to simply be a trans person of color in a world that can be cruel and unjust. In this project, I am dedicated to failing at humanizing trans people of color; similarly, I am disinterested in maintaining the category human intact, precisely because I believe there does not need to be any argument made for our lives. Such discourses replicate viscous cycles of anti-Blackness, settler-colonialism, xenophobia, and femicide that perpetuate our death by the pathological need to “make human” vulnerable flesh in a rights-bearing liberal democracy that allows certain human beings to live, and the rest to die. In this way, I am dedicated to the mundane affect of simply being, the depressive episode of having to keep going on in a world that is often so cruel to us. Although I run the risk of being annoyingly close to parroting liberal self-care discourse, as trans people of color, our potentiality might only be afforded in the here and now. Speaking from a perspective as a sound studies scholar, we might perform such utopianism through a commitment to the now that hears. Sound, as the always already here, might show us strategies for hearing, here-ing, a now that allows for us to simply be without a need to justify our existence through becoming human subjects.