Cruel Realities, Queercrip Fantasies: Beyond Trumpian Political Urgency

Abstract

abstract:Following US President Donald Trump's executive order declaring the existence of only two legally recognized genders, popular liberal/left responses asserted the order's logical (and scientific) incoherence, claiming the furtherance of trans rights as the pathway most aligned with so-called reality. In this paper, we offer a more expansive alternative, instead arguing that trans advocates must creatively respond to Trump's cruel reality-making by refusing the proposal of positive counterrealities. We first offer a deconstructive close reading of Trump's executive orders, revealing how the very claim to a knowable and enforceable reality undergirds the transphobic violence of the second Trump administration. Analyzing this use of positivist reality-construction to consolidate and weaponize political power, we argue that mainline reactions to Trump's policies are insufficient to successfully evade their cruelty because they participate in the same structural and affective logics of those policies. We then analyze the blending of aesthetic performance and creative play within queer- and trans-of-color tabletop roleplaying as a form of radically alternative reality-building. By privileging ephemerality, pleasure, and the potential incoherence of dispersed narrative control, media artifacts like Dropout Television's Dungeons and Drag Queens enact world-building practices of care that imagine queer and trans existence beyond dominant modes of resistance to the cruelty of transphobic political power. Our argument places these texts in conversation by drawing on queercrip theory, queer-of-color critique, and Black feminist theory to chart thoughtways outside of the limiting exigencies of urgent political clarity.