Elaborating decolonial and intersectional methods, aesthetics has developed rich tools for tackling power differences. A philosophical question arises about the nature of gendered embodied experience and materiality: How to comprehend the cultural field if it is at once a site of heinous expropriation and violence and one of vital social and political possibility? This essay explores this question through a reading of Claudia Llosa’s film The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada) (2009). The film, we show, reworks racial, gendered, and colonial logics and supplants a model of transculturation, magical realism, and syncretism and its attendant figuration of resistance by a cultural vision of a web of multivalent, pluri-directional aesthetic promises and threats. Thus it presents a young Indigenous woman as a contemporary decolonial actor who, in encounter with popular culture and the global marketplace, renders memory livable and opens up unforeseen futures for her young town and country. We signal the implications for the positioning of the decolonial feminist spectator or culture maker and for a decolonial aesthetics. Aesthetic existence at the intersection of oppression and liberation, although impure and troubled, functions as a bountiful font of feminist energy and sustenance and a site of communal caring and imagination.

This paper explores trans poetics as a way of doing trans philosophy. I begin by giving an overview of the current state of trans philosophy. I then give examples of other literatures wherein poetics is taken to be philosophically robust. After giving a brief history of trans poetics, I turn to the poetics statements and poetry of three trans poets—D’Lo, Ching-In Chen, and micha cárdenas—featured in the 2013 anthology Troubling the Line. I show how poetry is often uniquely able to capture the ambiguity of the WTF of trans experience in ways that differ from philosophical argumentation. I conclude by suggesting that poetics might move us away from a potential politics of suffering in trans philosophy to a politics of liberation.

What does epistemic decolonization mean for contemporary rethinking of the body, gender/sexuality, and knowledge in feminist and queer scholarship? Through a close reading of Chinese medicine’s classical text Huang Di Nei Jing (Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon), this essay proposes a “body-of-orifices” in which the penis like the vagina and the anus is but another orifice among other more visible bodily openings. In feminist and queer theorization, the penis has been almost only accounted for as something else, as the metaphoric pen, the psychoanalytic phallus, as anything other than the organ itself. Meanwhile, in pornographic, cinematic, and other visual representations, the Asian man’s member(ship) is largely denied, nowhere to be seen. This invisibility mirrors the overrepresentation of white male philosophers in much of queer theory’s theoretical foundation. Engaging closely with feminist and queer re-readings of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis while delving deeply into the philosophical and cosmological concepts of Chinese medicine, the essay also argues that the body-of-orifices entails a different heuristic model for a less hegemonic practice of knowing based on cultivation of passivity and receptiveness, which is very different from the colonial/modern model of knowledge-acquisition as mastery, penetration, and possession.

The three short pieces below are part of an alphabetically ordered series of entries, which, together, will constitute a non-subject-centered autobiography. Professional memories are merged with personal ones. To underline the fragmentary nature of memory, I call them “vignettes.”

This article is a co-written reflection on the process of curating and programming Printing Solidarity: Tricontinental Graphics from Cuba (2021–2022). Held at Stony Brook University’s Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, the exhibition featured over sixty posters and printed matter produced mostly in the 1960s–1970s by the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) in Havana. As an experiment in pedagogical curating, the yearlong project spanned the isolation from, return to, and re-envisioning of inperson learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reflecting on our inspirations, intentions, and challenges, we argue for the role of art objects in activating material-based, in-person learning on campus and consider the value of academic collaboration, cross-regional research, and experimental pedagogies. The project offered an opportunity to revisit the Cold War-period politics of global solidarity in today’s pandemic era while exploring what it would mean to study art today from the question of solidarity rather than division.