My work is rooted in the lived realities, intellectual traditions, and everyday practices of Black queer and trans life. I draw from abolitionist, Afropessimist, and decolonial frameworks, and I write toward the worlds we build outside institutional permission. These are some of the critiques I encounter most often. I share them here not to pre-empt disagreement, but to name my commitments with honesty and care.
I. Place, Scope, and Positionality
1. Your work focuses mostly on Black North American experiences. Is it relevant globally?
Yes, my work is grounded in Black life on Turtle Island, because that is the context in which I live and organize. I write from Tiohtià:ke, on land that remains unceded, in a settler colonial state that weaponizes health, care, and identity against Black queer and trans people. But anti-Blackness is not confined to one place or nation. It moves globally, shaped by the afterlives of slavery, imperialism, and colonialism. While the forms of anti-Blackness vary, its foundational logics remain. My work begins from where I am anchored, but it is always in conversation with global Black thought and resistance. It is not about applying a North American framework elsewhere, but about naming the ways Black life continues to be marked and made fugitive acrossgeographies.
2. Do you engage with other communities of colour or decolonial solidarities?
Absolutely, and I do so carefully. I centre Blackness because it is often erased or subsumed in broader frameworks of “people of colour,” where anti-Blackness gets collapsed into general experiences of racial marginalization. But I understand liberation as a shared project. I stand with Indigenous, Palestinian, and other communities whose struggles intersect with mine, and I build relationships based on accountability, clarity, and care. Solidarity does not require sameness. It requires respect for difference and a commitment to refusing the structures that harm all of us.
II. Methodology and Approach
3. You use personal narrative and autoethnography. Where is the critical distance?
I don’t believe that critical distance is always a strength. In many academic traditions, “distance” has been used to erase the bodies, grief, and communities at the heart of knowledge production. My use of personal narrative is intentional and methodological. It makes visible how structures of violence are lived, how they shape memory, kinship, and care. But it is never just about me. I connect my story to collective conditions, archival silences, and theoretical frameworks. My work is not memoir—it is grounded, situated critique.
4. Is your methodology rigorous enough?
Rigour is not limited to statistical analysis or institutional research protocols. I work with methods that align with my ethics. These include storytelling, refusal, speculative writing, and grounded theory shaped by Black queer and trans lifeworlds. These methods are not less precise. They are rooted in care, accountability, and attention to power. I do not reproduce dominant definitions of rigour. I expand what rigour can look like when it is shaped by those pushed to the margins of knowledge production.
5. Is the speculative work you do actually useful in the material world?
Yes, and deeply so. Speculation is not just about imagining distant futures. It is a way of noticing the fragments of liberation already unfolding. Ballroom is speculative care. Mutual aid is speculative care. These practices are not theoretical. They are alive, messy, and built by people who understand that survival requires more than policy—it requires imagination. My work honours these practices not to romanticize them, but to make visible the ways we organize care outside systems designed to disappear us.
6. You use terms like refusal, disappearance, and ungovernability. What do you affirm?
Refusal is not a lack of vision. It is an ethic of protection, especially when visibility becomes dangerous. I affirm care that moves without state permission. I affirm kinship that doesn’t require blood or paperwork. I affirm joy that is not performative, but rooted in intimacy, defiance, and memory. I affirm the slow, often invisible ways we hold each other through systems that try to keep us apart. This is not abstract—it is survival, and it matters.
III. Political Commitments and Institutional Critique
7. Isn’t your work too political or activist to be considered academic?
Yes, it is political—because Black life is politicized whether we choose it or not. I do not believe that objectivity exists outside of power. My work is rigorous, but it does not pretend neutrality. I am accountable to community first. That does not make the work less academic. It makes it honest. Scholarship that avoids responsibility is not neutral; it is complicit.
8. You critique professionalization and institutions, but you’re still part of them. Isn’t that a contradiction?
It is a contradiction, and I live with it intentionally. I don’t pretend to be outside these systems. I teach, write, and practice in institutional spaces that have harmed my people. But I also use those positions to redirect resources, carve out fugitive space, and hold open the possibility of something else. I don’t confuse access with safety, or visibility with transformation. Being inside doesn’t mean I’m aligned—it means I’m trying to survive strategically. I stay connected to community so that I don’t get swallowed by the institution’s logic. If I ever do, I want to be called back. My goal is not purity. It’s responsibility, even in the mess.
9. You critique professionalization and legitimacy. How do you avoid co-optation?
The risk of co-optation is real, and I don’t take it lightly. Institutions are skilled at absorbing critique and neutralizing resistance. I try to protect what needs to remain fugitive. I don’t share everything. I move strategically and stay in relationship with community, so that if I ever lose my way, I can be called back. The goal is not to be safe within the institution. It’s to use what’s there without letting it use me.
IV. Relevance, Impact, and Scale
10. Isn’t your work too niche? How does it apply to people outside Black queer and trans communities?
The idea of “niche” is often used to dismiss work that centres those pushed to the margins. But what’s called niche is often where the most transformative insights live. My work does not aim to speak to everyone. It is accountable to those who live at the sharpest intersections of harm, because that is where the clearest visions for freedom come from. If others find resonance in that work, they are welcome. But I don’t dilute it to be palatable.
11. Your work doesn’t centre institutional change or policy recommendations. How do you envision impact?
I am not trying to fix the system. I am trying to trace the ways people survive in spite of it. That means turning attention to the kinship networks, care practices, and collective strategies that exist beyond recognition. I am less interested in scale than in depth. If this work supports just a few people in living more freely or feeling more seen, that’s enough. Not all impact has to be institutional. Sometimes it’s a small, quiet survival that matters most.
12. Can your work lead to systemic change?
Systemic change is not always about visibility or recognition. Sometimes it starts with refusal, with the decision to stop participating in systems that harm us. My work is about naming those moments and understanding them not as absence, but as strategy. Change doesn’t always look like policy. Sometimes it looks like choosing each other.
V. Complexities, Contradictions, and Accountability
13. You draw from Afropessimism but still speak of survival and futurity. Isn’t that contradictory?
It is a tension, and I sit with it. I don’t seek easy resolution. Afropessimism helps me name the depth of anti-Black violence, the structures that position Black life as outside the human. But I also see the ways we live, love, and create in the midst of that. I don’t believe in redemptive hope. I believe in survival without guarantee, and in care that happens anyway. That’s not contradiction. That’s the complexity of Black life.
14. Is your work accessible to the people it’s about?
That’s one of my ongoing commitments, and also one of the hardest things to get right. I write and speak with my communities in mind first—Black queer and trans people, especially those navigating survival outside institutions. That means I often choose clarity over jargon, story over abstraction, and tone over polish. At the same time, I don’t always use “plain” language. Sometimes complexity is necessary. Sometimes poetry says what theory cannot. What matters to me is that the work stays legible where it matters, and that I stay in relationship with the people I write toward. I’m not aiming for universal accessibility. I’m aiming for meaningful connection across different ways of knowing. And when I miss the mark, I try to listen and adjust.
15. You often speak about refusal. What about responsibility?
Refusal is part of responsibility. I refuse structures that were built to destroy us, because I am responsible to those who are still here. My responsibility is not to institutions or to respectability. It is to the people who hold me, challenge me, and keep me alive. That kind of responsibility is not about compliance. It’s about care.
16. Do you romanticize ballroom or mutual aid as ideal alternatives?
No. These spaces are imperfect, like any other. Harm happens there too. But they offer different logics—ones based on collective survival, chosen kinship, and improvisation. I honour what is possible in those spaces without pretending they are utopias. My work is about naming the real possibilities they offer, while also holding their limits with honesty.
17. Is there space for joy in your work?
Yes, absolutely. But not the kind of joy that demands performance or denies pain. I’m interested in joy as something quiet, defiant, and often fleeting. Joy that emerges in a look, a gesture, a moment of rest. Joy that does not erase grief, but sits beside it. That kind of joy is central to survival, and it lives in everything I write.