UC Berkeley

By utilizing Indigenous, Black, and Latinx Feminist and decolonial methodologies, this dissertation reorients the epistemological, theoretical, and political commitments of trans studies in higher education. Through a critical phenomenology of what it is like to experience transgender inclusion in the University of California, Berkeley campus, I analyze how trans- Latinx graduate and undergraduate student populations from Afro-Latinx, Yaqui, and Purepecha Indigenous communities engage with and negotiate the range of programs, services, policies, and initiatives to mediate their academic and everyday lives. I draw from a range of qualitative Latinx and feminist research methods such as co-participant observations, testimonios, pláticas, focus groups, and auto-historia teoría to analyze the complexities of (learning) and navigating transgender inclusion on the college campus from the perspective of trans* Latinx populations.Unlike recent studies on transgender college students’ experiences that frame “transgender” as a discrete category of gender and ethnographic analysis, I problematize gender universality (Lugones, 2020) in gender equity research design and empirical studies focused on racialized trans subjects. In turn, I approach the study of trans* Latinidad as a resistant sociality from a Latinx and decolonial philosophy of ontological and existential pluralism (Anzaldúa, 1987; Lugones, 2007; Ortega, 2016) to analyze trans Latinx students’ complex and multiplicious trans* experiences of being, embodiment, and materialities (DiPietro, 2019) in their encounter with monocultural trans pedagogies structured by the university. In doing so, I advance a trans* of color critique centered on the participants’ multifaceted perspectives on identity, Third Gender social organization, and Third Gender imaginations in response to the pedagogies of “learning to be” trans and Latina/o/x in the university under hegemonic conceptions of Western/Eurocentric identity models that structure transgender equity policies and services in the university. My research reveals how the university draws from white-centric and colonial racialized-gender ideologies on personhood and identity. Gender equity and inclusion ideologies are a disciplining mechanism of the pedagogies of being and belonging through what I call the colonial-gender continuum. Through this concept, I describe the dynamics by which the university institutionalizes, normalizes, and includes trans people through an Anglo and white-centric understanding of trans care and embodiment that attempts to contain racialized gender variability and resistant sociality even when it depathologizes transgender personhood. The colonial-gender continuum explains how the university continuously disrupts and harms trans* Black, Indigenous, and other Students of Color via the discursive and colonial logics of third gender gendercide embedded within trans inclusion programs and services. I argue this form of violence, harm, discomfort, and distress in a students’ life is better understood as colonial dysphoria that results from the institutional approach to trans identity from the logics of absolute sameness. I show how organizing trans inclusion from the position of the “logics of purity” limits our understanding of complex, co-constituted, and relational constructions of trans*- Latinidad. To this end, I demonstrate how the current approach to trans inclusion effectively limits how trans* Latinx students can fully show up, be supported, and affirmed by the university. My work introduces a trans* of color critique as a research model attentive to the ongoing resistant imaginations that cultivate new forms of trans* belonging and wellness. Most significantly, I offer a nuanced approach to studying resistant sociality in education. Moving away from socio-cultural studies of resistance in education that rely on the agency of subjects, I shift towards Latinx philosophy (Lugones 2007; Ortega 2016; DiPietro, 2019) to theorize on the notion of terquedad as a resistant sociality that emerges from the oppressing⇔resisting relations in education that actively transforms the worlds of sense within the university.