Hello! Seeking 1-2 additional papers to join a trans studies panel at the 2026 American Studies Association Conference. Abstract for the proposed panel is below; please contact Anna James (AJames@franklincollege.edu) if interested. Thanks!

Panel Title: Minoritarian Gestures, Improvised Lives: Everyday Performance of Trans Resistance

Abstract: Many aspects of transgender lives, especially their quotidian gestures, remain overlooked. While some queer lives have been spectacularized—largely those within cis gay culture, as we see for instance on RuPaul’s Drag Race and other recent television shows like Heated Rivalry—everyday performances of trans resistance received little attention. At the same time, trans individuals have remained on the margins of a patriarchal racial regime, and it would be a hasty generalization to Otherize queer and trans self-expressions or resistive performances as detached and distanced from the banal dailiness of eating, drinking, socializing, taking a walk, and dressing up. This panel poses a question: how do trans subjects protect themselves from everyday aggression and transphobia while subtly contesting a trans-antagonistic regime through daily practices? José Esteban Muñoz has conceptualized this idea as “disidentifications,” a practice that allows a minoritarian subject to create variations of oppressive cultural norms as a mode of subtle resistance without completely capitulating to the system. Echoing Muñoz, the panel asks what kinds of trans everyday performances have been underscrutinized? What kinds of cultural or material objects are involved in such disidentificatory practices? How do these nonnormative performances create tiny, or even large, crevices in the imperial and racialized conditions of the U.S. and “little Americas” that try to efface the presence of trans individuals? In the words of Juana María Roudríguez, our panel seeks to envision an “imaginary time and space of our own creation” that exceeds the current gender, sexual, and racial scripts we are compelled to live under and to probe the making of a queer utopia through daily queer/trans gestures and performance. Positioned in conversation with the work of Marquis Bey, micha cárdenas, Jian Neo Chen, Jules Gill-Peterson, and others working at the intersection of trans theory and cultural studies, our panel cultivates analyses of trans everyday performance grounded in minor practices and material forms.