This article aims to explore the potential of transgender studies to offer new trans* and interdisciplinary perspectives that simultaneously question dominant power structures and engage with multiple and unexpected becomings. We believe that the disruptive force of trans-disciplinarity lies in its capacity to open up space for marginalised populations and knowledges by creating a co-emergence of theories and methodologies that, rather than gathering different disciplines around the same topic, becomes, in Roland Barthes's words, 'a new object that belongs to no one'. The article attempts to reimagine interdisciplinarity as a decolonial trans-practice that questions broader processes of exclusion occurring in academia. Such envisioning will unfold around the concept of intersectionality, which we consider necessary to challenge and transform the exclusions reproduced through disciplinary knowledge production. In this respect, we maintain that interdisciplinarity must be constituted so as to transcend and queer not only disciplinary boundaries, but also the processes of normalisation that create them. We combine this theorisation with the Mayan principle of In Lak' ech, which unveils the interdependence of animate and inanimate beings on Earth and thereby has the potential to disrupt not only the notion of 'proper object' that belongs to specific disciplines but also the 'proper subject', namely disciplinary hierarchies per se. The principle of In Lak' Ech allows us to envision transdisciplinary becoming as a practice of intersectional resistance that opens space for radical, trans-, queer, and decolonial social critiques.
Inspired by poststructural discussions on subjectivities, borders, and practices of inclusion/exclusion, this essay draws a preliminary enquiry into the (neo)colonial and (neo)capitalist dichotomy of 'human'/'non-human', in order to envision radical rearticulations of humanness. Deploying Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Butler and Athanasiou 2013) as the main theoretical framework, I argue that the matter of the 'human' is inherently embedded in dominant discourses of private property, according to which subjects 'exist' as 'human' only when they can exert their possession over others. My concern, then, develops around the necessity to configure claims for (recognition of) rights for dispossessed individuals and communities in ways that work to undo the oppressive equation 'being=having' (Butler and Athanasiou 2013). In this sense, this article investigates the concept of the 'common' (Federici 2010; Hardt and Negri 2009) as a strategy to rethink the 'human' in relation to 'others', and to the earth. To do so, it focuses on the Zapatista struggles for access to land and self-government, which from 1994 have radically transformed the community life of several indigenous villages in the Mexican region of Chiapas. Through the development of the concepts of 'being-in-common' and 'becoming-as-common', I will argue that the 'common' has the potential to transform humanness into an inclusionary site of multiple becomings.
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