Spacetimegenderings: How Trans Secondary Students Matter in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This research employs an agential realist lens to explore how trans secondary school students matter in Aotearoa New Zealand. This inquiry resists representationalist essentialisations of trans students, which dominate accounts of trans people and impede their ability to respond to the world. Instead, this study attends to the material-discursive, multiplicitous, dis/continuous, and more-than-human constitution of gender, expanding analysis beyond purely discursive accounts and providing a means of re/configuring im/possibilities in ways that proliferate students’ capacity to respond to their worlds. Recognising that what mattered to students could not be known in advance of relations, a postqualitative methodology was employed, avoiding predetermined and procedural methods, and attending to relations as they emerged. Four students mapped their educational worlds over two cartographic intra-views. Between the intra-views, students carried out an art project of their own design to embody their genderings. In turn, these artworks were used to explore how students’ genderings might traverse the worlds they had mapped. Students’ im/possibilities materialised as temporal entanglements: their worlds were never simply here-now, instead constituted by pasts that had (not) been and futures that might (never) be. Tracing the entanglements that rendered trans spacetimegenderings im/possible offered a sense of how trans students’ worldings might be responded to, such as re/configuring trans medical apparatuses or fostering spacetimematterings that exclude cisnormativities. Subsequently, the three relata chapters at/tend to how present im/possibilities were constituted by temporal entanglements, how spectres of in/justice haunted students, and how futures might be response-ably re/configured. While trans students’ worlds were haunted by in/justices, such as cis- and trans-normativities, ongoing attendance to the boundary-making practices that constituted them fostered hope as relationships with spectres were re/configured. The im/possibility of response-ably re/configuring trans students’ worldings is always already present. Based on an agential realist ethics of responsibility, trans students matter because their becoming intrinsically re/works relationships with the spectres of spacetimegendering in/justice, re/negotiating how spacetimegendering im/possibilities might be responded to.