Queer and trans* Texans have faced scrutiny and precariousness for decades. But in 2022, a series of sweeping legal decisions, increasing economic inequality, and state-level political attacks very publicly threaten the safety and stability of many in Texas’s queer communities. This audio short explores how artists and activists across the state are making and using stages at pride celebrations to draw attention to the histories of and possible futures for queer and trans* people in Texas and beyond.

Archival audio of Sylvia Rivera speaking at the Gay Pride Rally June 24, 1973 at Washington Square Park, NYC courtesy of the LoveTapesCollective, with special thanks to the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

By using the death of Sarah Hegazi, a queer Egyptian woman who died in exile after being imprisoned and tortured in 2017, this audio brings into question the place that queer women occupy within the heteronormative carceral state and the tension that arises when these same nation states claim to support women. Furthermore, it interrogates the limit of state feminism in Egypt and questions how gender is mobilized to further carceral logics and institutions.

Queerness, Race, and Reproduction: Exploring the Politics of Childcare Through and Beyond Lee Edelman and José Muñoz
This open-access education resource explores the political, social, and theoretical issues surrounding children, childcare, and reproduction. It begins with a personal reflection on how my queer friends and I would speculate about the possibility of having children as undergraduate students. I observe that our queerness made these questions so salient to us as we recognized the unique challenges that we had as queer children. I then explore a tension within queer theory between scholars Lee Edelman, who characterizes childrearing as a necessarily heteronormative endeavor, and José Muñoz, who critiques Edelman’s argument for ignoring the fact that society does not value Black and brown children in the same way as it does white children. Despite Muñoz’s influential critique, I caution against assuming that critiques of the imperative to reproduce necessarily exclude racial analysis by drawing on the work of Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe, who calls attention to the ways that racist institutions have forced Black people to reproduce in certain contexts. By putting these scholars in conversation, the audio reflects on the wide-reaching practical and theoretical consequences of reproductive politics.

What does it mean to run while Black? Writers such as Mitchell S. Jackson and Alison Mariella Désir encourage us to reflect upon the intersection between race, running, and embodiment. As a Black runner and Sport Studies scholar, I am also deeply interested in this relationship. In this audio short, I bring listeners with me to a 5K race held on Juneteenth and examine the relationship between running, historical memory, racial trauma, and social action.

In this audio short, Joe Baez gives an intimate portrayal of living in a fat body.

Queer Chisme is a cultural intuitive way of knowing rooted in survival by womxn, queer, trans, and those at the margins to survive cisheteropatriarchal structures (Gonzalez, 2021; Gutierrez, 2017; Trujillo, 2020). The chisme exposes power imbalances and cultivates community and safety with those who we can build kinship with to resist and exist in collective spaces. I use chisme as a way to share care, to mobilize towards advocacy, and expose inequities in higher education (Gonzalez, 2021). I invite you to listen and use this queer chisme sensory audio experience to reflect, move towards healing, and learn more about the power within you.

In “Puerto Rico Obituary,” poet and activist Pedro Pietri calls upon colonized folks to “kill, kill, kill the landlord of their cracked skull” by celebrating their identities, using “…their white supremacy bibles for toilet paper…”

Meditation is a practice that can teach us how to “see what is” beyond the messages we receive and, in that way, can be a pathway to internal decolonization and liberation. A radically accessible care praxis, mindfulness pushes us to question if we are unruly, unworthy, or if that is a message we have been sent by capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacy.

In this audio short, Caitlin invites us to fake it ‘til we make it, breathe into bell hooks’ teacher-healer ideal, and to kill, kill, kill the landlord that tells us we are less worthy of peace and joy; that ease is not our birthright.

Or, as Caitlin so charmingly says, call bullshit and step away.

If it sounds fun or supportive, start or deepen your meditation practice for free with Caitlin on Insight Timer.

Special thanks to Caitlin’s big brother Jon Wubbena (jonthefunkymonk.com) for creating the intro song and sound support.

Thanks, also, to the Smithsonian. "Puerto Rico Obituary" by Pedro Pietri from the recording entitled Loose Joints: Poetry by Pedro Pietri, FW09722, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. (p) 1979. Used by permission.

This offering is for those who find themselves grief-ridden as they become more aware of how their lives and those around them are structured historically and presently by oppression. It is an approximately ten-minute guided meditation to acknowledge and honor the grief that inhabits the listeners’ bodies. The meditation also invites listeners to self-affirm their presence and survival. Warsan Shire’s “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” and Destiny Hemphill’s poem “mapmaking” serve as anchor texts. Instructors, students, and organizers might find this meditation supportive while learning/teaching about oppression or reckoning with the near aftermath of an oppression-rooted tragedy.
References
“What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” (poem) by Warsan Shire: https://verse.press/poem/what-they-did-yesterday-afternoon-6524900794187889060
“mapmaking” (poem) by Destiny Hemphill: https://www.frontierpoetry.com/2019/05/03/poetry-destiny-hemphill/

This audio examines how cases of femicide in Egypt are mobilized to further empower carceral logics and institutions. By examining recent femicide cases in Egypt and the states unequal response to them, this audio highlights how the Egyptian carceral state uses the murder of women to mark certain masculine subjectivities as predatory and to further enforce a paternalistic relationship where the security state always emerges as the (masculine) savior of the murdered victim.