Content area
Full Text
The asterisk is a portal and a pause.
The asterisk is not a signifier of a destination.
A destination, here, is a form of violence.
The asterisk is an invitation to meditate on a material condition with legal, social, and cultural consequences in the hopes that one can depart from that reality.
The asterisk is not a star; it is not a burning rock, but some might argue that it is a rock that burns.
The asterisk feels. It is a feeling of stillness and prolonged puncture.
The asterisk is alive, but one cannot insist life onto it.
The asterisk is not a person or an identity.
The asterisk has been attended to and perhaps, it does not want to exist anymore. This is why the asterisk is a portal and a pause.1
The asterisk is not an arrest, it is a pause.
The asterisk is not a hold, it is a portal, but the asterisk [temporarily] embraces the hold [of the ship : belly : sigh : breath].
The asterisk is not a signifier of gender or race or nation-states; all those kill, kill, kill.
The asterisk is a portal and a pause.
On Zoom, Omi Salas-SantaCruz shares that one of the problems is that people always want to start with "the human" when extending care to the trans· experience. And that's the problem. The cis think they're extending care. But each attempt at care ends up in a desire for intelligibility. And what if the radical potential of trans· liberation is not legibility and uniformity but the endless possibilities within the simultaneity of experimentation, abstraction, opacity, and reworlding?
A trans· future necessitates the undoing of mastery. If the trans· subject must first be human, then doesn't that limit all other trans· possibilities? Lock all understandings of trans· to a medicalized (or at least, psychoanalyzed) Western understanding?
The cis spin planets to understand trans·interiority. And the tea is that there is no need for understanding. trans· is. That's it. trans· is trans·temporal, trans·hemispheric, trans·gressive, trans·imaginative, in trans·it, in trans·it always. There need be no more language.
On university campuses, there are classes on capital t, Trans Studies. Sometimes, Indigenous understandings of spirit, kinship, and land are subjugated to "transgender." And that's the limit of...