Keynote Panel:

Tulio Bermúdez Mejía

Maple Sterling

Jada-Amina

Trans Narratives and Humor: let us be

Tulio Bermúdez Mejía, The University of Chicago

Maple Sterling, Independent Community Member

Jada-Amina, Independent Researcher

Is trans joy and linguistic humor a form of resistance, or is it just being?

Dominant culture’s hegemonic discourse about trans people uplifts cis narratives, which focus on anti-trans hate and pain. Trans narratives of joy and humor are intentionally underrepresented, and difficult to access.

Widespread hegemonic jokes against trans people circulate globally (Baker 2014), as most recently shown by Netflix’s endorsement of comedian Dave Chappell’s 2021 transphobic special The Closer. Narratives of trans pain dominate public knowledge of trans people: medical discourse interactions create dehumanizing trans experiences when searching for gender-affirming care (Borba 2019). In fact, national U.S. discourse abounds with transphobic news including Texas banning healthcare for trans kids, and punishing adults as inflicting “child abuse” if they support trans kids.

There are few narratives about how trans people use language to reclaim their bodies (Zimman 2017) or lift each other up (miles-hercules 2020). Furthermore, when trans people agentively enact self-determination, we are often framed as performing active resistance or “attacking” dominant culture.

In this talk, we focus on how trans joy and trans humor in specific is not an attack, it is just a space to be ourselves. We perform humor though anti-hegemonic discourse on binariness and transphobia. These linguistic practices function to reclaim narratives and form communities of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992) in order to survive and experience collective joy.

Jokes created by trans-identified people align with anti-hegemomic humor of other marginalized communities of practice, including Indigenous Maliseet (Perley 2011), Indigenous Naso (Bermúdez 2020), Deaf (Sutton-Spence & Napoli 2012), African American (Calhoun 2019), and diasporic Dominican (Durán-Almarza) communities.

Tulio Bermúdez Mejía, The University of Chicago

Tulio (they/he) is a professor and advocate disruptor. They are passionate about experiencing and reproducing joy in their communities through play. Their biofam is from colombia but they have chofam in indigenous panama, costa rica, texas, and chicago.

Maple Sterling, Independent Community Member

Maple Kaos Kosmos Honey Kashew Cahal Sterling been traveling round since he was a kid. They use all pronouns as they love to explore gender and who makes it. She lived in Ohio, Arizona, California, and now Illinois. With many cultural influences in they life, they have taken the stoic approach to life that has allowed them to appreciate the dance that is the divine. Here, in their writing, is where He expresses his depths.

Jada-Amina, Independent Researcher

Jada-Amina is a South Side Chicago born and based, Black Indigenous American writer, interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and cultural worker. Their filmmaking practice engages legacies of the Black family, Folklore, mythmaking, and the archive. Jada-Amina’s work is deeply rooted in theories of Black collective conscious and Black diasporic cultural hybridity. Their work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Echo Park Film Center, The Music Box, and DocFilms at the University of Chicago

References:

Baker, Paul. "Bad wigs and screaming mimis’: Using corpus-assisted techniques to carry out critical discourse analysis of the representation of trans people in the British press." Contemporary critical discourse studies (2014): 211-235.

Bermúdez, Tulio. (2020). Ideophone Humor: The Enregisterment of a Stereotype and Its Inversion. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 30(2), 258-272.

Borba, Rodrigo. (2019). The interactional making of a “true transsexual”: Language and (dis) identification in trans-specific healthcare. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2019(256), 21-55.

Calhoun, Kendra. (2019). Vine Racial Comedy as Anti‐Hegemonic Humor: Linguistic Performance and Generic Innovation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 29(1), 27-49.

Durán-Almarza, Emilia. M. (2011). Chewing English and Spitting Spanish: Josefina Báez Homing Dominican New York.

Eckert, Penelope, & McConnell-Ginet, Sally. (1992). Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual review of anthropology, 21(1), 461-488.

miles-hercules, deandre. (2020). “A Way to Lift Each Other Up”: Blackfemme-ininities and the Materiality of Discourse. Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Linguistics.

Perley, Bernard C. (2011). Defying Maliseet language death: Emergent vitalities of language, culture, and identity in eastern Canada. U of Nebraska Press.

Sutton-Spence, Rachel and Donna Jo Napoli. (2012). "Deaf Jokes And Sign Language Humor". Humor. Volume 25, Issue 3. 311-337.

Zimman, Lal. (2017). Transgender language reform: Some challenges and strategies for promoting trans-affirming, gender-inclusive language. Journal of Language and Discrimination, 1(1), 84-105.

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