This session is an exploration of the subversive temporalities and geographies that shape trans and queer life. From Turkey to Brazil, from Black and Latinx House Ballrooms to hospice facilities, tenderness, softness, and joy contrast with the hardness of the state as this panel considers the reorganizing potential of space and place in transforming sociality, while looking to quotidian practices and strategies that make up queer, trans, and two-spirit livability and sustainability.
This paper theorizes the sleepover party as a form of queer and trans Pentecostal study. Drawing on multi-year ethnographic research with differentially racialized queer and trans Pentecostals in São Paulo, Brazil, I examine all-night, intergenerational sleepovers held in cramped apartments as sites of queer and trans Pentecostal worldmaking. Building on queer anthropological approaches to the “infraordinary,” Moten and Harney’s notion of “study,” and recent work that troubles binaries of sacred/profane, ecstatic/secular embodiment, and serious/silly, I argue that the sleepover emerges as a sacred practice of collective respite within an anti-Black, LGBTQ+-phobic, and class-stratified world. Singing praise music, putting on wigs, gossiping, sharing miracles and prophesies, drinking wine, and staying awake through stretches of boredom, the sleepover is a kind of vigil. As a “minor method,” it redirects attention toward the “micropractices” that sustain queer religious life and the infraordinary of queer religiosity.
This paper approaches the trans child not as a marginal figure of contemporary panic but as a central device through which religious nationalisms organize futurity. Focusing primarily on Turkey, it traces how family rhetoric, child-protection discourse, and reproductive policy converge to make the family appear natural, the nation coherent, and religion protective. Bringing queer and trans temporality into conversation with the study of religion, the paper argues that anti-trans governance does not simply misrecognize trans life. It overdetermines it, naming trans life as the figure against which the future must be secured. By reading law, public rhetoric, and policy as religiously saturated forms of reproductive governance, the paper contributes to ongoing conversations on queer and trans futures and reproductive futures.
This paper argues that queer fugitive joy is not merely an affect that accompanies queer life but a practice that reorganizes bodies, time, and belonging into durable sacred forms. Against both queer theory's tendency to let negation have the last word and softer celebrations of joy that detach it from fugitivity and collective struggle, the paper reads three scenes of queer gathering as sites where joy does organizational work. The Black and Latinx House Ballroom scene functions as fugitive ecclesial practice rooted in African diasporic religions. Two Spirit powwows reclaim Indigenous ceremonial form from which gender-diverse people were excluded through colonial violence. A trans rebaptism in San Salvador seizes Catholic liturgical form from the institution that brought it through conquest. Across these scenes, queer fugitive joy assembles kinship, invents ritual, and produces sacred space, rehearsing futures that the present cannot authorize but that fugitive practice has already begun to construct.
Drawing on experiences providing nursing care for people dying from AIDS in Frankfurt in the early 1990s, I argue that hospice care reveals a queer temporality that is best understood as an entangled field established by the conflicting futurities of both labor and of utopian worldmaking, as well as by a present emerging out of cooperative action. This present is both overdetermined through multiple “copresences” (Beliso-De Jesús) and underdetermined in its outcome because its futurity is shaped by “xenoteloses” (Blas,), i.e., ends that escape utopian or capitalist blueprinting. It is neither open nor foreclosed to futurity.