Tough Breaks: Trans Rage and the Cultivation of Resilience

Abstract

Countering hegemonic understandings of rage as a deleterious emotion, this article examines rage across specific sites of trans cultural production—the prison letters of CeCe McDonald and the durational performance art of Cassils—in order to argue that it is integral to trans survival and flourishing. Theorizing rage as a justified response to unlivable circumstances, a response that plays a key role in enabling trans subjects to detach from toxic relational dynamics in order to transition toward other forms of gendered subjectivity and intimate communality, I develop an account of what I call an “infrapolitical ethics of care” that indexes a web of communal practices that empathetically witness and amplify rage, as well as support subjects during and after moments of grappling with overwhelming negative affect. I draw on the work of trans, queer, and feminist theorists who have theorized the productivities of so‐called “negative” affects, particularly Sara Ahmed's work on willfulness and killing joy (), María Lugones's writing on anger (2003), Judith Butler's Spinozan reassessment of the vexed relations between self‐preservation and self‐destruction (2015), and the rich account of trans rage provided by Susan Stryker ().

Passionate Speech: On the Uses and Abuses of Anger in Public Debate

“…This kind of anger does not seek redress because instead it functions to push away its targets by threatening or scaring them. The intimidatory function of anger is not the sole preserve of arrogant anger, but it is often also present in the anger of members of subordinated groups, especially when they fear for their own physical integrity (Malatino, 2019). However, it is also an efficient weapon in the hands of those whose anger functions to push other people down so that they can emerge victorious.…”

“…Rage, for instance, is often uncommunicative. It can for example be used to scare people away (Malatino, 2019). I return to this point in section 4 below.…”

The Colonial/Modern [Cis]Gender System and Trans World Traveling

“…As semantically self-coherent, gendered language in Two-Spirit worlds does not depend on the dominant world's sense of the clinical and violent gender binary. However, when we find ourselves erased, abjected, and in zones of social death where we are chronically forced into isolation, away from intimacy, friendship, and solidarity, once more we are forced to retreat into a chrysalis (see, Malatino 2019, 127). We are cocooning, “an inward motion intent on sense-making” (Lugones 2003, 103).…”

Corrigendum

“…In page 99, line 21, the sentence should read as “A productive break requires witnesses/interpretive communities that offer many forms of caring labor “from attending to basic survival needs to generating, supporting, and co‐elaborating continued reasons for living” (Malatino , 131).”…”

“…In page 99, line 25, the sentence should read as “Malatino seeks an “infrapolitical” (under the radar; see Scott 1990) ethics of care that goes beyond person‐to‐person care ethics and “into a terrain shaped by the recognition that caring, in the context of structural marginalization and systemic violence, must always be collective” (Malatino , 131).”…”