marissabrameyer

[marissabrameyer]

Here is my final, let us all go forward and create.

[marissabrameyer]

5/27 Transforming Borders

Where do we go from here? We create. It's as simple as that. I've been on a mission to get as many historians as I can to engage with feminist theories and one of my usual segues is the use of affect theory and the idea that our lived experience affects our scholarship so instead of pretending that we are in pursuit of objective truth, we lean into that affect and let it guide our work. I think that implementing the lessons of this class looks different for everyone, but there's no right or wrong way to do it. The goal is to loop in more experiences, a broader lens, a more holistic understanding of what we're talking about in our scholarship. I am a trans historian that focuses on Texas and while I am not writing a specifically chicano/a history, some of my narrators are chicano/a trans folks and I am now better equipped to A. understand where they are coming from and B. record their history in a genuine, loving, and authentic way. I think more broadly, things like Nepantla and Borderlands theory help us grow to be okay with ambiguity in our scholarship. From the fragments that I am collecting of people's lives, and of the trans history of the city of Houston, I have to construct a narrative as best I can with the limited resources that I have. I will never fully understand my historical subjects, and that is okay. I endeavor to understand them as completely as I can, but full and complete understanding is impossible. Instead, I want to celebrate people's gender in as holistic a way as I can. I am not interested in claiming historical figures for one canon or another, I am interested in the ways in which people have historically lived outside of the gender binary.

I think to me transforming is just about putting good into the world in whatever way you can with whatever resources you have. I have this vast toolkit available to me from my time in WGS and from my history classes, and I have the ability to create something beautiful with those tools. Right now there is not a trans history of Houston, but there will be. This is how I can help my community, put good into the world, I take the lessons I've learned and the ways I've learned to write histories and I go and create something beautiful. It doesn't have to be the greatest thesis the world has ever seen. I am recording the lives and stories of those who don't usually get to see themselves represented in their history classes, and that is beautiful. I seek only to do them justice.

This class has been really healing for me. I will use that healing to go forward and create and put good into the world.

[marissabrameyer]

5/26 Border Crossers

I think that as borderlands scholars have begun to demonstrate how physical borders are not as clear cut and defined and defended as we might think, more room has come for other types of borders to take up space in academic conversations. Like our classmate Megan is from Ohio, but she is no less a Latina for it, and indeed she has to cross many of the same societal borders. Of course there is a privilege in being born here, especially if the circumstances of your birth grant you US citizenship, but a racist old white dude is going to look at her the same way that he looks at someone who may have physically crossed the US-Mexico border. The same preconceptions, prescriptions, and politics are ascribed to her and thus she carries the same borders.

As far as what borders I cross, I think it is really only gender and sexuality. Both my gender identity and sexuality are non-normative and cross the barriers of what has been allowed or what has been the normative in the US. I don't worry as much about being misgendered anymore because there is no way that someone would be able to understand my gender based off of my appearance so I'm more comfortable with any pronouns than I used to be. But... I used to be so anxious in every situation. I got so good at listening to speech patterns that I could recognize when a pronoun is coming in a sentence and I would preemptively wince in case the wrong one was used. That was a lot of weight to carry into every social interaction that I had and it made living pretty miserable. But I no longer aspire to cis-womanhood. I am my own thing and my gender is my own and no pronouns or way that I am perceived is ever going to fully encompass the breadth of my gender identity. I identify as a lesbian which is both a border against the normative, but also - because I'm trans - my position in the lesbian community is also precarious. There is a non-inconsequential group of lesbians that define their lesbianness by the absence of a penis and that's frustrating as a trans lesbian.

I like these pieces, but I think I'm more reminded of the politics of higher education. My initial thought was that I wanted to critique her for using such theoretical and highly academic language especially when she gives a specific example of when she was interacting with community without using the highly academic language she is using in the talk. But on second thought, it seems like an unfair critique. Don't get me wrong, I am all for accessibility and making academia less jargony and more accessible because what is the point of talking about the subaltern and dispossessed if we're using language that they themselves can't relate to without years of background training? But then I thought about the politics of higher education, and I thought about how the author has spent her entire career having to justify her presence in academia and the legitimacy of her work through existing modes of evaluation and structuring academic writing at work. This happens a lot with especially women of color who are looking for tenure, their first books tend to be jargony and academically tight because that is how they will be judged for tenure. Throughout Rivero's career she most likely wasn't able to use more common language because she had to fight for her place in academia and prove she could do the academia things while moving academia in a new direction. This is all a lot to say that I love what she has to talk about, it's a little inaccessible to non-academics, but there are politics of academia that dictate the language minoritized scholars are forced to use.

Borders are porous. At no time in modern history has a border been so rigid that culture, people, goods, and ideas have not crossed it. Of course they loosen and tighten based on political machinations, but even physical borders are not permanent or impermeable. Much of the greatest art (I'm lumping scholarship in with art) that has been created has been created by those who have crossed borders. Art should push what we understand the human condition to be and art that is created from Nepantla is so specifically good at that. There are unfair expectations placed on minoritized academics. They are expected to do more, present more, create more, affect more than their white counterparts. As a result, scholars that experience multiple intersecting axes of oppression tend to be on the cutting edge of the fields they find themselves in. Some of the most generative fields of history right now are the Black Atlantic which is being led largely by Black femmes, and the American Borderlands, which has seen a surge in scholarship from Latina writers.

[marissabrameyer]

5/25 RE: Framing

I think this goes without saying, but this process lines up pretty well with conocimiento. Because of course, we create art for healing, we create art while healing, and we heal to create art. The two are inextricably intertwined, and while not all art has to heal or be healing, art is an invaluable tool for healing. This is a really great way to talk about the creative process. It is abstract enough that it applies to a broad range of people, but specific enough that it resonates, and I think that's what art is good at. We all take and give to art what we need making ourselves and art stronger. There's a queer youtuber called CJ The X who makes video essays and they released a video yesterday on this topic. In the video he talks about how we often create art either for love or fear, how we can have good motivations and unhealthy motivations in creating art, and that it would be tempting to say that we should squash the fear in our creative process, but that we should learn what we can from the fear, learn why it is that fear drives us to create and then use that knowledge to serve and create even greater art. This really resonated with me. I used to tell people that I got into history to provide a voice for the voiceless, and this is partially true of course, I care deeply about the subaltern and dispossessed, but there was fear. Nothing I did was ever good enough for my mom, I always had to one up myself, which created the people-pleaser and constant need in me for academic validation. These are the insidious reasons that I create, to satisfy the part of my mom that remains in me that tells me that nothing I create is good enough and that I need to move immediately and grow immediately and create something greater immediately. That voice has quieted to a whisper in recent months. Partly because I cut my mom out of my life, but partly because not having that voice from her has allowed my true inner voices to speak their truths in her absence. I create because I want to put good into the world. That's truly as simple as my motivations are. My work comes from a love of humanity, of those different from me, of those who have theorized and lived different realities than the one they were borne into.

I only just recently started my own research for my thesis. It took me a while to pin down my topic. I was worried that I had to create (with my MA thesis) the next intervention in the field of trans history. And while I still want to create the best thesis that I can, I want to do it while writing about what I truly care about, which is preserving the history of Houston's gender-expansive community because they have made my life greater than I could have ever imagined it could be. This is going to sound super privileged, and I understand that, but there is a lot of pressure when you grow up in an upper-middle class space to become either a doctor, engineer, or lawyer. A non-stem major just wasn't a possibility for me for a really long time even though I felt that pre-med was the wrong choice. My mother was a nurse and had encouraged me to be a pediatrician from the time I was super super young. And because she was footing the bill, pediatrician it was. I learned far more with my liberal arts degree than I ever learned in stem cramming the night before a test to memorize so many things that I would immediately forget. Of course stem is a valid choice for those that are passionate about it, but that's not what my brain wants me to do. History has allowed me to heal, grow, and understand the world around me. Most importantly, it has helped me realize that I am just a conduit for this story. This story is bigger than me. I don't need to worry about putting on an awkward presentation at an academic conference because this story is bigger than my 15 minutes of fame. This story is bigger than the city of Houston, it is bigger than just the trans community. I am but a small part and a conduit by which this story will be recorded. And I hope to do it justice. I no longer strive for academic validation in the same ways that my mom expected of me (for the most part). I am creating something bigger than me. And even if only my committee reads this version of the story, this story is written down and the world is better for having it preserved.

"You know that to become unblocked something must give, something must die--your ambition, your obsession with perfection. You have to let go of the illusion that the writer exerts full conscious control over her writing process." p 114.

I don't remember most of 2015-2019. My brain has suppressed much of my memory from this time as a trauma response. But there is one thing that has stuck with me from that time, and it is the music that I listened to. I don't remember what happened in my life in those years, but ever since this song came out in 2017 it changed my outlook on life and I know that I have been building towards something Bigger Than Me. I didn't always know what that was, and I may still be wrong about what it ends up being, but I'm doing this for my city, for my community, for liberation of all peoples, for the earth, for my dad. The things I create will always and forever be Bigger Than Me. And in this I take comfort.

[marissabrameyer]

5/24 Pop Culture

I have a ton of thoughts on this! This: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrew.callaghan/video/7056525255120014639?lang=en is a tik tok/youtube video that got huge last year. It sparked a tik tok trend and speaks exactly to what we're talking about today, the objectification of Latina women. Context surrounding the video, Andrew Callaghan is an independent reporter/journalist who creates videos on Youtube and Patreon under the handle Channel 5 News (formerly, All Gas No Brakes). Andrew has been lauded for doing some incredible work with documenting the BLM protests in 2020, the Chauvin trial verdict, the January 6th riots, etc. The work he has done is incredible. He really captures what it felt like in those moments. However, he also platforms the most insane right-wing takes ever. He is very clearly against these types of beliefs, but nonetheless provides a platform for them. And if there's one thing that is true about art, it is that the creator loses control of the art the moment it enters the public sphere. So oftentimes Andrew's long-form interviews, which were done in good faith, will get clipped and take on a life and trend of their own. This happened with the above tik tok and it gets at something that I've been feeling recently. I feel like fetishization is now being disguised as acceptance. This language is going to be awkward but I'm not sure how else to write it, but as it has become more acceptable to date outside of your race, I think many white people have done so and have seen themselves as a white savior. We saw this with enlisted men marrying East and South Asian women during the Vietnam war. We see this with the fetishization of Filipina women. We see this with the fetishization of kpop artists. And while there has long been a white savior complex in American men, I think the important distinction is that while I was growing up I heard J.Lo called exotic and different in derogatory ways. Now, I feel like people will objectify non-white women and try to disguise it as acceptance and being woke. As if being a misogynist to a larger array of women makes you progressive.

I most recently butted up against the fetishization of specifically Latina women in Chris DiStefano's new Netflix special "Speshy Weshy" I turned the special off after about ten minutes when he spent those first ten minutes of the show talking about how he (a white man) was now Puerto Rican because his wife and children are Puerto Rican. He kept going on about how he was a proud Puerto Rican man and blah blah blah. The vibe was that he objectified his wife. By marrying her, he now had access to this new world of cultural experiences that he felt entitled to.

I thought the readings paired well with each other. I didn't know a lot about Frida Kahlo other than that she was queer. The two readings we had on her lead me to an debate that I've been having with myself for a while.... which is that we firstly need to unwhitewash and unwater-down historical figures, understand them for the political people that they were, and celebrate that. On the other hand, some of the best representation we have is problematic. Ellen, great for lesbian representation, also hangs out with George Bush and is famously abusive to her staff. Ru Paul, made drag more mainstream and accessible, also is transphobic and really into fracking. Caitlyn Jenner, great that we have a famous trans person to initiate conversations, also got away with manslaughter and actively works against the trans community in favor of siding with the rich. All of this is to say that the representation we have is complicated. I am of course grateful to everyone above for being themselves publicly, that can be enough, but we also have to understand that rich people are first and foremost rich, they may also be trans and queer and black and brown, but they are rich above all else and so it's never really full and complete representation. I of course put none of this baggage on J. Lo because I simply do not know enough about her life based on one day's worth of readings. Representation matters, life is messy, I'm proud of those who stand up in the face of objectification even if they are super rich and far removed from my own experience with queerness.

I think that objectification can be empowerment if that is what you're looking for. If objectifying yourself makes you feel good and it is done on your terms and with your boundaries then go for it. There is liberation in dressing outside of the norm and if you are doing it for yourself and it makes you feel powerful, then go for it - though it is vitally important that these things are negotiated on the individual level.

I feel that my thoughts aren't as cogent as they have been other days, this is a complicated topic. Representation and objectification are tricky, and I'm not sure that I have fully parsed out what I understand them to be, but I'm on my way there.

[marissabrameyer]

Testimonios Through Creative Acts

I want to talk about this piece of artwork first. This caution 2 were the paintings that caught my eye when I looked through these the first time without having watched the interview. I was drawn to the circles first and foremost. I don't know a bunch about color theory or how to mix colors but I'm pretty sure that mixing the colors on the outside circles makes the colors of the inner circles i.e. blue and red turns into purple. This is a recurring theme in her work, two things mixing to create something in the middle. Sometimes it is the medium, sometimes it is representative of her personality, lived experience, history, hobbies, etc., but there is always a mix. And I like that a lot because not only is there a mix, but the mix is generative. And not that everything has to be generative, but like this painting talks about, this is all about healing. Healing past trauma, healing your childhood, healing your adulthood, stitching everything together to create something new and different and strong. So I guess those are my favorite tropes in her work: mixing, stitching, and healing. I like that she switches between languages in her work, like she alludes to in the interview, it changes the engagement that non-Spanish people have with her artwork and I like art that does that. I appreciate art and work that forces colonizers to engage with the art on the artist's terms, rather than the viewers terms. With the added layer that Sandra is talking about immigration here, expressing the needs wants and fears of her community, I think it is really powerful. It indicates that in order to truly understand our neighbors we have to engage with them on their terms and in the ways in which they show up and interpret the world around them. She cannot wholly convey her experience without switching between Spanish and English because that is her own reality. It also forces non-Spanish speakers into a halfway place as well. Because they can understand the English parts, but not the Spanish parts and so, unless they do the work to translate and understand, they are only ever understanding half of the art. Though I suppose the opposite could be true as well, that it leaves Spanish-only speakers in a halfway place as they can only engage with the Latine parts of the art which further gets at that idea of only being half understood by each part of your identity.

Going back to the circles, I like them because they simultaneously remind me of cells, and of topography. To me, they look like those textbook cross-sections of a cell and perhaps I'm reading into this, but to me it comes off as representing that these circles (different influences on her identity) are so integrally a part of her identity that they are baked into her on a cellular level. On even the most microscopic level she is at least partially defined by living in the in-between. The reason I see topography is twofold. The first is that topography of the cell, topography of the self, is a beautiful metaphor, but in the sister work in this series we can more clearly see that this is about border crossing/living on the border/the Latine experience of being on the receiving end of prejudice from fearful white people. It shows physical and mental borders, and then with her stitching, those borders are being pulled together and healed. And healing is what it is all about, on the bottom right of the painting she talks about how going forward she wants her work to be joyous, to be a celebration of what life has to offer. She has made peace with her past, with her place in the world, with the in-between, and she is waiting with open arms for the world to give what she has to give. A small detail that I personally like is the "Anyways, I was supposed to talk about..." It reminded me of my pen pal. I write old-fashioned letters to one of my very dear friends and we'll sometimes give each other prompts but we always end up rambling and at least one point in each of our letters we say "Anyways, I was supposed to talk about..." and I really love the beauty in that. Let's get lost in tangents, whatever speaks to you.. think about it.. talk about it.

This is the other piece I wanted to talk about. When I first saw it, it reminded me of my colleague who writes about Chicana girlhood. And then listening to Sandra explain it, I liked it even more. When I first looked at the work I only saw a cage, I didn't see the skirt which Sandra explains is a common motif that she goes to. And then there is the different pieces of cloth surrounding everything, and on top of all that, there is the stitching that ties it together. It has many of the same elements of what I appreciated about Caution, with the added dimension of girlhood. And not only girlhood, but stolen girlhood, girlhood where she has to work far too hard for far too little money. Childhood means a lot to me, it is the focus of my scholarly work, and through this course's reflections, I have come to more deeply appreciate why I picked childhood as my topic of study, it is to stitch together and heal my own childhood. I didn't have a girlhood. I am no less of a woman for it, but I didn't have that experience. I had something in-between, because I was socialized as a boy, but I was never a boy in the way my parents, friends, teachers wanted me to be. So while I was socialized as a boy, my childhood is more nuanced than that. Yet, none of that childhood was girlhood and it is something that I long for. I have made peace with it, and it isn't something that I actively yearn for anymore, but I have had experiences where not having had a girlhood is isolating. I surround myself with majority queer women/femmes and while we often relate on many things, girlhood just isn't something that I can relate to and I used to feel robbed of that experience. I now know that my experience was somewhere in the middle, and no less beautiful because of it, but that in betweenness will always be a part of me, even if I have healed it. And even still, I got a non-traditional girlhood. I transitioned right after high school and so I spent my college years figuring out what womanhood meant for me. So I went through an accelerated experience of coming to womanhood, figuring out what that meant for me, and being comfortable with that identity. I went hyper-femme, then figured out that some of the stuff I did as a boy still fulfilled me, then I figured out that women can do masculinity as well (dare I say better, even). So I still did have that girlhood where I figured out where my specific place within womanhood was going to be, and that is beautiful too. But of course, my stolen girlhood is different from Sandra's and from other girls of color. Like I've said before, I grew up very comfortable and never had to get a job until I wanted to build my own PC and buy more fast food, so my relationship to the rest of the painting is more strained. Still, art is partly about what we pull from it, and there are parts of this painting that resonate deeply with me, and even the parts that don't specifically resonate with me, I can use to understand other people's experiences. I think this is one of the beautiful things about art, is that if you can hook someone from a different lived experience with some aspect of your art, and they relate to it deeply and emotionally, it becomes easier to get them to understand the other aspects of your art that are equally important to you.

I'm all about healing right now, and this class has been incredible for that. Providing me with language and the space to work out my thoughts that have been bouncing around. This semester was really tough for me and I was beginning to feel burnout, but this class has reminded me why I am an in academia. I am not in academia to argue with military historians about whether or not civilians should be tear gassed (real conversation that I had in class this semester), I am in it to heal, to create something beautiful, and to do my small part in working towards collective liberation.

[marissabrameyer]

5/20 Testimonios

Surprisingly, this is only the second time in my college career that I've been asked to specifically reflect on how my class shows up in my life. The first was in an anthropology class my junior year of undergrad, where he asked us to literally list out markers of our class. I listed things like my designer boot collection, my Jeep Wrangler, my house that my parents had outright bought for me to live in while I was doing my undergrad degree. My situation has changed since then. I cut my mom out of my life because I finally learned the language to describe the abuse she was putting me through and with my graduate stipend I was able support myself and live on my own for the first time in my life, so I was not longer financially dependent on her. If it wasn't clear, I grew up firmly middle to upper-middle class. I'm 24 years old and I've had three different cars that were bought for me, I had an entire house to myself while I was doing my undergrad degree, I was able to graduate, largely, debt-free, etc. I enjoyed a very privileged life. Since cutting my mom off, I moved from living like the child of someone who makes six figures, to literally living at the poverty line. And yet, so much of my privilege has carried over. I still have an incredibly nice vehicle, and if I'm ever in financial trouble I know that I can count on my dad to help me out, luxuries that people whose families have been excluded from generational wealth building don't have.

This all makes my position as a Marxist/communist/leftist somewhat odd. I've definitely received all the benefits that white people are supposed to enjoy under capitalism, and yet I have seen how that system has torn apart my family and relationships. Everything for my mom was a transaction, and because she had access to capital, and I was too young to recognize what was happening, she had transacted her way into owning everything that I needed to live, and would often threaten to take it away. From a young age she would write up contracts and have us sign them for various things including borrowing money, and that's just a bonkers mentality to have towards your children, especially if you have access to capital that would allow your children to live comfortably. But instead she decided to artificially manufacture scarcity amidst abundance - the heart of capitalism.

All this is to say that I have a convoluted connection to class and lived experience. My experience was very much so a privileged one and so I often feel like an outsider when writing about the working class. Especially because my career choice is *academia* which is famously elitist and often disconnected from the material reality of the people they study. But I work really hard to learn all I can and being a leftist is an integral part of my identity as a scholar.

Also, please keep in mind that these are my personal relationships and reflections on class, I have studied and written extensively about the historical contexts of the working class and subaltern and I am also just aware of the wealth disparity that we live in, the horrible housing market, the failure of the government to take care of it's citizens during COVID, etc. So I understand that this reflection comes off as selfish, but I have written 40 pages in the past three weeks about class in a historical context and so I decided to be selfish for a second and reflect on my own life.

[marissabrameyer]

5/19 Invoking Art

What does it mean that metaphors are Gods?

This first question comes from the Anzaldua reading and the assertion that metaphors are Gods. I was raised in the southern baptist church which is famously unkind and because of that I've always had a weird relationship with religion and spirituality. For a while after rejecting the church I was reductive of religion. Much of my undergraduate classwork was in anthropology which has a very academic understanding of religions as systems by which people make sense of the world around them. I think where I went wrong is that, 1. I would conflate religion with spirituality, which are not the same thing, and 2. I saw these as outdated understandings of the world now that science had advanced to a sufficient enough degree that it serves as a system by which we can make sense of the world around ourselves. I spent my undergraduate years in pursuit of objective truth. I took historical canon to be objective truth, and that was the system by which I understand the world around me. What broke me out of that was Nepantla Squared, by L Heidenreich. The book introduced me to two things. The first is that historians are disingenuous if they say that they are in pursuit of an objectively true historical canon. There is no such thing. Historians and their works are influenced by their lived experiences and instead of looking for absolute truths about the world, we should lean into how our personal life shows up in our scholarship. We should take comfort in the ambiguity and form the most complete stories we can about people whom we will never fully understand. History is now the means by which I make sense of the world around me, but not in the way that I am looking for objective truths about the world, but in the vastness of what came before me and how people have made homes for themselves on this earth. History, for me, is spiritual. As a white of random western-european descent and no real sense of ancestry, I find meaning in the Longue Duree of human history. I draw strength from the centuries-long revolutions that have theorized and created otherwise places. Places of healing and safety amidst a deeply colonial world. I do not claim any one history for myself, nor do I claim Nepantla though it has helped me immensely in my path towards consciousness. I do not believe that these are my things to claim, but their lessons resonate with me and I see myself as a small part of a long fight towards liberation from modes of organizing government, society, and economy that are exclusive rather than equitable. So I suppose metaphors are Gods. They are the means by which we make sense of the world around us and are thusly spiritual immensely powerful.

What does it mean to challenge borders?

This comes from the second reading and their discussions of colorism and class in conjunction with art. I thought of this question because I often get lost in theory and the academized parts of understanding the world around me, but it helps me immensely to see these things in action. I could talk endlessly about borderlands theory and the simultaneous beauty and isolation of the in-between, but this reading is an example of where borders are being tangibly broken down. I have been exposed to colorist conversations before, but have never really engaged super critically with them and it was interesting to see that the Latine that shows up in institutions (in this case art) is not necessarily representative of the Latine experience. Many of these people in positions of power are white or white-identified Latine people and that position of being able to pass as white is a clear privilege that I just haven't really thought about before. It isn't just that white-passing Latinos have additional privileges, their lived experience is going to be vastly different from non-white-passing Latine individuals, especially when class is involved as well. And that lived experience is going to show up in the art that is created and displayed. So, yes, the white-passing Latine experience is valid but it is not the only or maybe even most prominent Latine experience and it is important to elevate art from wider experiences.

How does our relationship with art change if we don't split "the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life"

I read each of the readings and reflected one by one rather than reading them all and then reflecting, so it is interesting that we come back to this question again. It relates heavily to the first question but I have more to say on it. I want to start with a story from my teenage years. My childhood bestfriend is an artist, always has been, always will be, and the things they create are truly incredible. When we were both in high school (he's a couple years ahead of me) I have a distinct memory of making fun of him for wanting to pursue an art degree. In typical baptist church fashion, that sucks all the beauty out of growing up, so many adults in the church were critical of him, saying that they'd never be able to make a living with art, and that he should choose a useful degree (all of the tired critiques directed towards non-STEM majors). I had been a discouraging voice to my best friend on top of everyone else belittling their life's path, and I think about that memory often. For the very longest I thought of art as disconnected from reality, from the everyday. I did not see its spiritual aspects and the ways in which artists use art as a medium through which they express their lived experiences, their joys, their pain. I think this view of art began to shift in one of my museum studies classes where we took a trip to the Menil in Houston. At the Menil that day was a traveling exhibit called "Mapa Wiya: Your Map's Not Needed" and it was Aboriginal artwork that rejected colonial maps. The artist had painted over these maps with a host of different messages and imagery, but the collection was emphatically against a colonized understanding of the world. This combination of what white people have taken to be an objective truth (geography) with art was the first time I had really been moved by art. Combining the two was wild to me, and it opened my minds to new ways of thinking about art and about geography. Because geography is not just the physical, it is the way in which we interact with the world around us i.e. social geography, political geography, etc. I never apologized to that friend, but I think often about how I should have been more supportive. They have a talent and vision that I have spent my life chasing, and it is insane that I wasn't supportive of the medium through which they express themselves. You can't separate art and everyday life. The two are intimately intertwined and feed off of each other. I know this now.

I especially adore my friend's use of backgrounds. Even when I do "boring" paintings that are just me copying a character from media that I enjoy, I try to make the background cool and creative and I model my backgrounds off of the vibes that his art gives me. I'm not going to post any of their paintings because that's not my place to do, but here are some pieces that I have done that were inspired by different things that they taught me about art. The background of the tree was stolen from a background of his that I saw and he explained that he just did the background and then taped it off and created this cool grid (they did it much better than I). The faces I painted after I visited him this past year and asked him how he got so good at painting bodies and hands and appendages. He told me that it was a lot of practice with proportion, but also he uses the rule of "if i can tell that's a hand, i'm done with it" and that really helped me when doing my own art. I don't care about creating a perfect face or body or hand, if I can tell what it is, and it makes me feel good, then I move on. The faces aren't great, but I can tell that they are faces and I like the way each looks. Anyways, I appreciate that friend very much, he's helped me make sense of the world.

[marissabrameyer]

5/18 Autohistoria & Conocimiento

I think that conocimiento is the journey to healing and to consciousness. I really loved the passage from Anzaldua and i decided to paint something today since we’re supposed to get creative and I really enjoy painting. I’m not great at it and I mostly just paint characters from media that I enjoy but I find it really cathartic and healing to create something and not worry about whether it is objectively good or not and just appreciate art that makes me feel good.

This is what I painted for today’s reflection. The seven different squares represent this path to healing and consciousness. The first black is the plunge into the other from the before. The second is the split that happens while you’re in the inbetween with black representing the before and white representing healing. The third is the acceptance that you have done irreparable damage to those that you love and that you are not a good person and the sink into depression. The fourth represents the call to action, the light that guides you towards healing amidst what is perhaps the deepest blackness you’ve known. The fifth represents growth and healing and understanding how to be better and put good into the world’s weave rather than bad. The sixth is the jolt back to reality. That we do not yet live in the otherwise and that a certain level of pragmatism and conflict resolution is required to navigate the world. And the seventh is consciousness, expanding out into the world with the lessons of the previous six with the goal of putting good into the world weave in an equitable and conscious manner.

The background is a mixture of light blue and lavender. These two colors represent someone important in my life that is no longer here, but the person who gave me that call to action. I was a bad person, but I can be better, and work to put good into the world every day. This was the background for the growth and healing. And now we see in the foreground, the light blue and lavender again. But this time they’re separated and each is more vibrant and pronounced for having done so.

I enjoyed today. It was healing.

[marissabrameyer]

5/17 Masculinities

I love this topic and it was something that I knew very little about going into today's readings. I had broadly understood it as toxic masculinity but I had not ever really thought about the ways that people are trying to deconstruct it. I appreciated that the reading clearly laid out the different aspects of machismo as I was not super familiar with it. I'm not sure that I myself have ever held stereotypes of a macho man in my mind... thinking back, I have only really ever had positive male hispanic role models in my life and I never really saw the toxic masculinity that I saw in my white friend's dads. I saw more of what the men in the survey described as defining masculinity which manifest in a deep love for friends and more specifically family, as well as a general adherence to trying to dismantle institutional toxic masculinity. I'm aware that this reads as if I'm elevating latine people but this truly has been my experience. The only relationship I have with stereotyping machismo is a general air of disdain of brown masculinity that shows up in right-wing media. Because I was raised in a conservative family, I was often exposed to the sorts of tired conversations that were like "oh look how poor Mexico treats their women, look how poor Middle Eastern countries treat their women, etc." Conversations that, of course, absolve white men of any culpability in the way they treat the women in their lives and how they negatively contribute to upholding hegemonic masculinity based on domination.

I think my best example to give is one of my best friends, Mario. We met at Blue Fish Pediatrics back when I was working in the medical field when I thought I was going to be a medical doctor. I met Mario pre-transition but I had only known him for a little while by the time I came out publicly but he didn't skip a beat. He invited me to church in case I needed community as I navigated coming out and I was wary because I was raised in the southern baptist church who are famously intolerant of anyone that isn't a devout old white man. But I ended up going to church with him, and going to small group with him, and his church congregation was genuinely one of the most welcoming places I've ever been and I take that to be a representation of his character. Of course being around queer people is nice, but that church was the first time I had been around non-queers who were just cool with however I showed up. Mario never skipped a beat when I came out to him, he helped me navigate the first awkward years of transition and even hooked me up with one of his friends who is a hair stylist to get my first women's haircut ever. Mario has all the good aspects of masculinity. He cares deeply about his friends and family and works to build safe and welcoming community. He provides for those around him without the expectation that he must be the sole provider. And as I have become more comfortable with my own masculinity, I have modeled my masculinity after his.

Closing shout out to Pedro Pascal and Oscar Isaac who are two of probably the most prominent latinos right now, who are both comfortable and aware of their gender and how their masculinity shows up.

[marissabrameyer]

5/16 Mestizaje

This is Jack Garland. They were a gender-expansive individual that lived in Greater Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century. My second favorite scholar (after my advisor of course) has written extensively about them as a Mestiz@ (pronounced mestiz-OW) individual whose life was marked by just all around liminality. The scholar is L. Heidenreich, they teach at Washington State University and study transness in conjunction with Mestiz@ conciousness and the work they do is beautiful. Jack Garland in particular though is a really interesting case and his life tells us a lot about the perception of gender and race. Jack was assigned female at birth and lived that way for quite a while. While living as a femme, Jack would more often face prejudice based on his race, and was consistently labeled as a other. But interestingly, when Jack transitioned and began to live as a man, he was suddenly white-passing and was treated as a white person.

When I was in undergrad trying to figure out where I wanted to study, I had been pointed in the direction of L. Heidenreich by one of their colleagues who had also written a trans history. Heidenreich's first article about Jack was the first piece of scholarship of theirs that I had read and I was immediately hooked. At this point in my academic journey I was definitely still surrounded by a lot of anglo and euro-centric histories and Heidenreich's article was such a eureka moment for me. It was the first time that I truly understood that my trans experience is not the trans experience that black and brown folks have. The complexities of how Jack's gender and racial identity intermingled with one another was, for me, the clearest example of what scholars mean when they are talking about intersecting axes of oppression. And I realized that Jack had lived a liminal experience that I could never truly relate to as a white person. Still, the liminality of the Mestiz@ experience has greatly influenced my work and my world view. Not to privilege certain types of gender expression over the other, but out of the gender experiences that I just don't get to be a part of, Mestiz@je is the one I admire most. There's just something so beautiful yet isolating yet generative about living in the in-between. Liminality is a way to make sense of a world where one never truly belongs, and yet belonging to the in-between is belonging in itself. I obviously understand the political and material impacts of living in this in-between, and my goal is not to romanticize it, because it has very real and tangible consequences but my favorite scholarship and art is created by those who live in the in-between.

[marissabrameyer]

5/13 Borderland Theory

I really understand borderlands theory to be all about the in-between. Geographically, it is largely focused on the US Mexico border - though scholars have recently applied borderlands theory to other locales. Culturally, economically, governmentally, it tries to describe these places of contestation where different cultures (in our case, American and Mexican) and create a new third culture that doesn’t belong to either. When thinking about the specifically human nature of this, I conceptualize it as Mestiz@ consciousness or the idea that you never fully belong anywhere and thus you live a sort of in-between life that can be extremely isolating.

I really like the way that borderlands theory talks about borders because it really breaks down the notion that the borders that exist now are a. impermeable and b. always there. The history of the US-Mexico border has seen the “barrier” between the two countries constrict and loosen at various times, but at no time is it impermeable. Culture crossed, people cross, goods cross, language crosses, music crosses, etc. And we have a lot to learn about all of those people and concepts that constantly straddle the border.

The US-Mexico border is a hotly contested one with deeply colonial roots. One of my favorite concepts of Chicano/a studies is Greater Mexico or the assertion that the region was unfairly taken by the United States, with the simultaneous acknowledgement of Spain’s participation in colonization. Conceptualizing that geographic region as still belonging to Mexico provides an interesting lens through which scholars can analyze the people and culture that reside in Greater Mexico. It accounts for the incalculable number of Mexicans that were suddenly under the control of an Anglo regime that did not have their interests in mind.

I like borderlands theory a lot. Because I’m non-binary I can understand (to a much smaller extent) the feeling of living in the in-between and it has been a useful toolkit in my own research as my research focuses on Houston which is a perfect example of a borderland.

[marissabrameyer]

5/12 Historical Contexts and Activism

I have a very broad conception of activist work. Because I am a firm believer that the person is political, I am more than comfortable labeling smaller acts of activism as activism. For instance, I would consider mentoring younger queer kids, which is something that myself and many older queer people have had to do, is activism. Helping them navigate the world in a safe and healthy way is absolutely political and activism in my eyes. On a more traditional level, I have been involved in activism consistently since I came out in 2012. Much of my initial activism was strictly queer. I started out by volunteering with different queer outreach organizations and worked on building community, educating, and advocating for queer rights. In undergrad I was heavily involved with my university's GSA throughout my time there, and was both Vice President of the organization during my junior year, and then President during my senior year. I learned a lot about what it meant to be a leader from that. In the beginning I was in activism for selfish reasons but as I grew more aware of the world around me I began to advocate for things that didn't directly affect me. Because my university was so small, and Texas A&M has a reputation for being not welcoming to minorities, the different diversity student organizations were tight knit and we would advocate for one another. Black Student Alliance showed up for us who showed up for the Student Association of Latino Leaders who showed up for the Black Student Alliance. That is really where I started to realize that liberation for some should include liberation for all. The queer world that I envision is the same space that labour activists are working towards, that black people have been working towards, that women's lib/reproductive rights has been working towards etc.

I also am of the firm belief that my scholarship is activism. I had an incredible undergraduate mentor at Texas A&M at Galveston (who was the one who got me into WGS) and she always reminded me that what we are doing is political. Teaching kids about expanding their world view to encompass lived experiences that aren't their own is political. History is political in that we as academics have to decide whose histories we are going to highlight, what events, we are going to highlight, and what we have to leave out for the sake of time. I constantly work towards making my historical work more accessible and inclusive and to me, who has come to accept that speaking is just not my forte, my academic work and work as a TA is where I felt I have been able to best advocate for liberation.

To appropriate a line from Ratatouille, "Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true-anyone can [be an advocate for the liberation of the dispossessed, mistreated, and subaltern]" -Chef Gusteau

[marissabrameyer]

5/11 Labels & Movements

I've been thinking about labels a lot recently so I love that this is the topic for the first day of class. I'm queer, I've been out as some form of queer since 2012 and my relationship to labels has changed a lot over time. At first I really appreciated labels, having language to describe the things that I was feeling internally was really liberating to me. Over time my labels changed as I discovered new words that better explained how I see myself. This has been especially true since I started working in trans history, as reading about different ways that humans have described themselves over time has helped me parse out my own identities. But then for a while I just called myself queer. The sheer number of labels available can be overwhelming and for a while I was content with just the label that my sexuality and gender are non-normative and that is beautiful. I still largely hold that belief, but I have since found the labels that truly describe me and thus I once again have a more fonder relationship with labels. Of course I have been labeled by others as well, I grew up in the suburbs of Houston and went to a 5A high school where I was one of two out queer people...out of two thousand students. Slurs were used towards me, but my memory of high school is more a general feeling of bad vibes and disbelonging.

I'm white and grew up in an upper-middle class family so queerness is the only vector by which I really experience harmful labeling. I try not to label others anymore given my experience with being mislabeled or maliciously labeled. I had never thought about specifically the hispanic v. latino argument before todays readings. I knew the technical differences between the two, but my engagement with these labels is with the more recent divide between latine and latinx. And since I've been in graduate school I've been exposed to scholarship that uses more specific language like Mestiz@, Chicano/a, Nepantleras etc. So given the discussion of hispanic signifying right-leaning politics and latino signifying left-leaning politics, I thought back to my childhood and realized that much of the political content I was exposed to (right-wing) used the term hispanic. I found it interesting that conservatives found lumping all spanish-speaking peoples together to be more useful as opposed to linking on the basis of latin american heritage. It is understandable though as conservative politics thrive on pitting white Americans against the highly recognizable, but still vague and amorphous "other". For that purpose, it would make sense that they would denote the defining characteristic of the "other" as being a spanish speaker.

I think there are absolutely benefits to labels, as we can see in Anzaldua's work. Labels like chicano/a, mestiz@, and nepantlera resonate really well with people who have spent their entire existence in a liminal space, not belonging to a specific side of the US-Mexico border, but both, and also neither. People can find liberation and community in labels. We are able to more effectively find others like us and advocate for ourselves when we have language to describe our experience. But hyperfocusing on labels, and the labeling associated with identity politics can be extremely detrimental. No label will ever fully encompass a person's identity and so each label is at least partially incomplete and inaccurate. Additionally, every label has politics and a history behind it and thus being labeled, by yourself or by an outside party has political implications that very much affect the labelee's material reality.

I think everyone uses labels to some extent. Nerd, athlete, gamer, kpop stan are all labels that help describe different aspects of people's identities. So on a very basic level, if I identify as a gamer, I am going to look for other gamers. As a queer person, I look for other queer people. We're all just trying to make sense of the insane world that we live in and how our unique (and shared) experiences affect the way we show up in the world. Labels are just one vector by which people make sense of the world around them. Yet labels have a deeply problematic history. Labeling and dividing up humans is historically how a minority ruling class keeps the majority working class suppressed.

To end on a positive note, there is a bunch of recent media that is making steps towards providing authentic representation of different labeled identities. "Crush" on Hulu and "Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" are my two most recent examples of this, and while Marvel's relationship with queerness is definitely not healthy, it makes me so happy that the current generation of queer girls can see themselves represented in comic book movies. We stan America Chavez and Xochitl Gomez. We now have a young, brown, queer superhero in the MCU and that is beautiful.