Preface: A Route to Theory

I too came to theory because I was hurting. I encountered feminist and queer theory at the same time that my life and sense of self were being radically reorganized by the fits and starts of an emerging queer consciousness. In my personal biography, graduate school marks this threshold. This coincidence has meant that my intellectual coming of age and the emergence of my queer—and, later, my trans—consciousness are sutured together, knotted together by deeply felt philosophical and existential problems.

In these circumstances, graduate school—and the broader intellectual milieu it introduced me to—was a paradoxical and ambivalent space, one that forced upon me a sudden and traumatic awareness of what it meant to be queer and trans at the same time as it offered concepts and tools crucial to my becoming, to my liberation. I read feverishly, the margins of my books filled with emphatic underlines and searching notes. I read with a sense of urgency, as though I was cramming books and theories and words and words and words into a steadily growing existential gulf—trying to bridge, to mend, to heal a widening disjuncture between myself and the world. I lived in theory; I needed theory to know myself, to become myself and something else, to heal and to live.

This short book of theory has emerged from the specificities of that struggle for clarity, for meaning, for space. In it, I write to repair, to repair myself and my world and to bolster the possibility of other worlds, worlds that can hold us as we work toward collective liberation. I adopt critical phenomenology—a philosophical and political project that begins from the edges of dominant worlds of sense—as a reparative and coalitional project that can make space for many marginalized worlds and name the trauma we endure living in and living for them.

While this book reaches toward collective horizons, it nonetheless represents a deeply personal philosophical project that is inseparable from the particularities of my lived experience and its epistemological limitations. In writing in this way, I intend not to reify a unified project of critical phenomenology, or to outline a specifically trans phenomenology, but to encounter phenomenology and the worlds it describes through the specificities of one trans life. Doing so allows me to trace how epistemology, embodiment, subjectivity, and space are woven together in experience and to illuminate the intimacies of sense-making and selfhood that phenomenology concerns itself with.

My purpose in doing so is not innocent; I embark on this philosophical project with the aim of willfully disrupting the reproduction of dominant worlds, taking aim at the assemblages of perceptions, meanings, spaces, practices, and material infrastructures that constrain and exert an unbearable pressure on my life and the lives of many others. Neither is the “I,” the self, that emerges in the scenes of this book naive or innocent; they are already caught up in theory. This writing, then, is not a simple synthesis of lived experience and theory as separate realms of meaning; in storytelling we are already engaged in an act of theorizing, and in theorizing we are doing the work of sense-making and self-making. Theory runs deep and wide, knitting the fabric of our selves, our perceptions, and our meanings. The question is: What will we make of this theory, these selves?

As a queer phenomenologist (Ahmed 2006), I do not attempt to bracket these complicated origins of self and meaning, to disentangle knowing from being, or to insulate “theory” from “flesh.” Rather, I embrace this mutual imbrication not only as an inevitable mark of human knowledge but as a creative means of tracing the co-constitution of our selves, our worlds, and the knowledge we make of them, reworking it all in a spirit of possibility.

For me, and I suspect for many others, this theory, this mode of writing and giving voice, can be a space not only of understanding but of healing: a place where we can work “at explaining the hurt and making it go away” (hooks 1991, 2). The theories that emerge from such a space may very well be hesitant and halting, bruised and strained, bearing the imprint of our individual and collective trauma. Mine are certainly marked by the violently dislocating and seemingly irresolvable trauma of being trans in this space and time. But these theories are also tender, yearning, unfinished: opening toward the possibility of healing and transformation, motivated by the impulse to continually rework this trauma into something meaningful, into something livable. These theories—our very own “theories of the flesh” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2021, 19)—and the selves we become through them, might serve, then, as a route, as an orientation, as a movement toward other worlds.