Graduate Compendium, MA Social Justice & Human Rights
This compendium will analyze the ways in which the lived experiences of mixed-race and transgender/nonbinary people overlap in the context of the racialized and systemically unequal United States and explore the concept of “queerness” as a rejection of both the socially-enforced mantels of race and gender and the mechanism through which individuals who exist “in the in-between” can carve out space for ourselves, our communities, and the unique way we experience life.
This analysis will be shaped heavily by the concept of liminality, the argument that “race” and “gender” are social constructs, and the stratification of human rights in the United States. This analysis will question the accepted belief that such traits such as race and gender are inherently tied to a person’s physical form and as such are permanent, and instead explore how both race and gender can change over the course of an individual’s lifetime because either the way they perceive themselves changes, and/or how the way they are perceived by society changes as norms and beliefs related to race and gender change over time.
My analysis of mixed-race and transgender personhood will culminate in an exploration of the intersection of these two identities as they present in a single person (myself), before moving on to the conclusion: Queerness as the Solution. This conclusion will explore the ways queerness functions as a rejection of both race and gender as “fixed” physical realities and as a mechanism for creating deliberate space for the existence of people who currently exist nowhere.
I present the original works of this compendium chronologically, and much like my personal experience over the last few years, the topics included therein reveal an identity in flux. Through the topics of the works included, the reader witnesses a person discover themselves and their social justice-human rights framework develop in real time. The analysis and conclusions I come to are relevant to social justice practitioners of various methods, other queer individuals exploring their identity, academics studying intersectionality, and others who wish to explore the philosophical nature of human existence and social constructs.
Relevant tags: intersectionality, feminism, intersectional feminism, social justice, human rights, human rights in the US, queerness, transgender, mixed-race, mixed in America, Hispanic, Latine, liminality, nonbinary