Sprawl: Emergent Forms of Thinking with Trans Care

Abstract

Sprawl is a word that describes zones of transition, often those that are untidy or irregular, not subject to a masterplan. It also names a kind of bodily comportment, a way of taking up space that is simultaneously awkward and luxurious, extravagant and ungainly. I think of the connections made in this dossier on Trans Care as sprawling in both of these senses, and surely more. Sometimes, they build between zones of inquiry that are as of yet quite underthought: between trans kin-making and climate disaster, for instance, or between public arts philanthropy and the racial politics of trans recognition. Other times, they pay attention to the sprawl, transformation, and zones of indiscernibility where trans care webs morph into other kinds of care webs: those concerned with disability justice, with the care hustles learned in the context of migrant survival, and with the care work involved in sustaining labor in informal economies, theorizing tenuous filaments of realized and potentially realizable solidarity. They think through the racial, gender, and sexual politics of suburban sprawl and cishetero domesticity. They theorize the (im)possibility of corporeal sprawl and bodily (dis)comfort, tracing the embodied nuances of trans inhabitations of many kinds of spaces: public, counterpublic, private, and semi-private. The dossier is beautiful, generous, and unpredictable in its sprawl, and a rich invitation to continue building in the gaps and spaces that feel more possible or habitable, to take up space while remaining mindful of the nuance and complexity that shapes what ideas and bodies are able to sprawl, and where, and what is overgrown and encroached upon in that process. Here, I weave one way through this sprawl.