As a queer, trans feminine, and non-binary Mexican American person, I focus my research on the amplification and liberation for BIPOC community(ies) through intersectional queer, transgender, and feminist resistance practices. My objective as a cultural rhetorician and technical communicator is to produce scholarship that is not only life affirming, but life saving for the betterment of communities who are impacted by dominant interlocking cistems of oppression. Through my publications, my commitment towards the amplification of disempowered and ignored communities is exemplified in the work I have done—I yearn to generate scholarship that attends to communities that are left on the margins and I aim to generate new considerations for the field of rhetoric and writing studies to support BIPOC lives.

 

For instance, in my dissertation project, ​​A Rhetorical, Coalitional, and Decolonial Critique on Cistematic Academic Scholarly Practices: Mobilizing Queer and Trans*/formative BIPOC Resistance, I engage in participatory action research and collected data from queer and transgender BIPOC scholars in Rhetoric and Writing studies and similar fields. I interviewed these scholars to consider how to engage in ethical queer and transgender practices in the academy in relation to pedagogy, scholarship, and community engagement. This project exemplifies how to 1) resist perpetuating harm in academic organizational practices in relation to queer and transgender pedagogy, research, and community engagement; 2) create a collaborative digital activist manifesto with queer and transgender scholars through a user experience method; participatory action, and 3) assert that queer and transgender rhetorics needs to cross disciplinary boundaries. As I argue, queer and transgender rhetorics remains a predominately white field and lacks BIPOC representation to support intersectional scholars. Thus, this dissertation project develops a formative example and illustrates a coalitional and decolonial trans*/formative social justice approach to urge higher educational institutions to better support queer and transgender BIPOC lives within the academy.

 

Currently, I am working on two research projects that will be published in 2023. For instance, in my accepted publication, I am composing an article for the journal of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine titled, “Building Queer Trans/formative Methodologies: Critiquing Institutionalized Cistems of Oppression,” In this article, I argue for the need of intersectional, sexual, and decolonial methodologies that can support rhetoric of health medicine researchers and practitioners. The exigency for this project is made evident through two important realizations: the field of rhetoric and health of medicine remains predominately white (Dutta, 2022) and lacks methodological approaches that pertain to queer and transgender approaches to this research area. Thus, this research encourages the field of rhetoric and writing to develop intersectional methodologies to support emergent and existing multi-marginalized scholars, while illuminating how institutional critique represents a decolonial, queer, transgender, and feminist methodological approach against medical institutions. My second accepted and forthcoming publication is for an edited collection where I discuss how queering as praxis can work in writing spaces: Queer Praxis in the Writing Center: Expanding Intersectional Paradigms. In the article, I use story as a primary method (and positioning my own intersectional queer/trans*ness) while meshing and threading intersectional queer, feminist, and transgender theories to exemplify how coalitional movements can support writing centers and its institutional campus partners during social justice issues through a speaker series I developed, created, and implemented. These two manuscripts illustrate how I examine, critique, and challenge institutional systems that impact queer and transgender BIPOC lives to provide approaches to create institutional change for the betterment of my communities. 

 

For future research, I am drafting a proposal for a book that expands on my dissertation project (tentatively titled A Rhetorical, Coalitional, and Decolonial Critique on Cistematic Academic Scholarly Practices: Mobilizing Queer and Trans*/formative BIPOC Resistance) to be submitted in May to Ohio State University Press’ Intersectional Rhetorics Series in August 2023. With this monograph, I do the double work of illustrating cistematic harm queer and transgender BIPOC folks endure within higher education’s colonizing and imperialist desires while also developing a guiding heuristic for institutions to use to address these harmful academic practices against multi-marginalized identities. This monograph exemplifies my commitment to develop critical and rhetorical work to support existing and emergent queer and transgender scholars.

 

Overall, these collective research projects exemplify the futurity of the scholarship I want to develop and create; and I aim to produce and generate epistemologies that discusses disempowered LGBTQ+ identities: queer, trans, and non-binary folx, to demonstrate the complex nature of the ways these identities navigate the world within and outside academic institutions through cultural, social, and political means.