ABSTRACT
While trans* visibility has been taken up as the mainstream political strategy du jour, critical trans scholars(hip) has continued to highlight the limits of a politics of visibility. That is, for trans* people of color, and especially trans* women of color, increased visibility has led to increased vulnerability, threat, and violence. Thus, trans* visibility as a strategy continues to forward a white, middle-class trans*ness that is incompatible with the plurality of trans* lives (Halberstam, 2018; Hayward, 2017). Countering such political strategies with what she calls “trans negativity,” Hayward (2017) gestures to how invisibility may hold possibilities for increasing life chances of those trans* people who are most vulnerable, most notably Black trans* women. In this chapter, I take up Hayward’s (2017) suggestion as a way to think of how invisibility may be one—but not the only—possibility for (re)envisioning trans* futures. In other words, I discuss the notions of willful opacity (Castro Samayoa, 2019) and virtual kinship (Nicolazzo, 2017) as strategies to explore how invisibility has already been used as a tactic for trans* world-making and, as a result, how such a move could be leveraged to forward liberatory pedagogical practice.
