Michael Tristano Jr. | Towson University (original) (raw)

Articles by Michael Tristano Jr.

Text and Performance Quarterly , 2024

I turn to collage to document my experience of doing performance studies work in communication st... more I turn to collage to document my experience of doing performance studies work in communication studies, broadly, and TPQ, specifically. I weave between performative writing, documents, personal narrative, and text to unsettle the place of performance. I emphasize (a) the enduring legacy of coloniality and white supremacy of performance studies and (b) how performance studies work has become unrecognizable to the discipline outside of those who engage with TPQ. I argue performance studies in communication has imagined itself in such a way that the work often becomes unrecognizable to others in communication and interdisciplinary performance studies. Time for something otherwise.

Sexualities, 2024

This essay moves through the nuances and complications of queer of color joy's potentiality. Mobi... more This essay moves through the nuances and complications of queer of color joy's potentiality. Mobilized through performance, queer of color joy is theorized as containing possibilities "to explore the limits of human curiosity; renegotiate what relationships can look, feel, sound, and smell like; and use desire to propel us through the social world where we refuse colonial futures and expand decolonial options" (Tristano, 2022: 279). Through a performance ethnography of VERSION, a dance party for queer and trans people of color which takes place monthly in Baltimore, MD, USA, I detail how queer of color joy circulates through complex modes of power. I move to theorize queer of color joy further by exploring how queer of color joy lingers. Gesturing towards after the party (Chambers-Letson, 2018), I detail how queer of color joy is performed outside of VERSION; after 2:00 a.m., on the sidewalk, and through clouds of smoke. Lingering, I argue, further animates queer of color joy's radical potential through queer relationality to nourish queer and trans of color lifeworlds.

Women's Studies in Communication, 2024

Queer of color lives are always lived in close proximity to violence and death. Said differently,... more Queer of color lives are always lived in close proximity to violence and death. Said differently, minoritarian subjects are constantly navigating positions of precarity in order to continue living. Precarity, then, is banal. This essay examines the quotidian performances of minoritarian subjects who navigate precarity every day. Animating this analysis is the Pulse nightclub shooting-an event which highlights the close proximity of precarity, violence, and death to queer and trans people of color. Through a critical, performance methodological framework, I weave together the stories of 12 minoritarian subjects in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as my own, to highlight the ways precarious performances manifest. I argue performances of precarity are a structuring component to minoritarian life which hold implications for minoritarian safety, community, and belonging.

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2024

This essay responds and extends the discourse found in Corey and Nakayama's "Sextext" and Gunn's ... more This essay responds and extends the discourse found in Corey and Nakayama's "Sextext" and Gunn's "ShitText." Examining the process of anal douching, which washes away fecal matter from the anus before penetration, commonly found in queer sex practices, I argue that queers do not want shit in their sex; douching serves to "clean up," sterilize, and legitimate queer sex in cisheteronormative culture. Through the method of critical erotic/a, I argue that douching is a process of decontamination reflected in larger disciplinary conversations about queer theory; we "clean up," sterilize, and legitimate queer theory to the cisheteronormative academy.

Border-Lines, 2023

As a sub-discipline, Jotería studies continues to catalogue and preserve personal, political, and... more As a sub-discipline, Jotería studies continues to catalogue and preserve personal, political, and academic experiences of Jotería bodies, narratives, and action. Indeed, there has been great explorations on how Jotería praxis, shaped by theories of the flesh, has been used for survival and resilience in the past. This essay, however, turns Jotería studies towards the future and attempts to articulate how the embodiment of Jotería theories of the flesh manifest into everyday performances of resistance. More specifically, performances of resistance which work towards abolitionist politics and worldmaking. Through an embodied approach to Jotería/queer of color/abolitionist worldmaking, this manuscript explores how Jotería studies can simultaneously inform how Jotería bodies perform survival as well as provides a framework to perform abolition in our everyday encounters. I argue that everyday performances of abolition lay the foundation for large, structural change many of us desire to accomplish.

International Review of Qualitative Research, 2022

This paper contributes to the literature on collaborative scholarship by bringing together data f... more This paper contributes to the literature on collaborative scholarship by bringing together data from two different critical qualitative dissertation projects in order to better understand the way power complexly flows through communities in both academic and non-academic contexts. The metaphor of dance is used throughout this piece in order to capture the embodied and messy process of being in collaboration with one another as researchers, as scholars, and as people that experience the material consequences of structures of power. We offer insight into our process and provide various examples of how our data danced with one another. We conclude with a discussion that adds to the conversation of collaborative, critical qualitative scholarship and the politics which shape our research commitments.

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2022

Through the use of performative writing and autoethnography, this piece reflects on the current s... more Through the use of performative writing and autoethnography, this piece reflects on the current state of collective crises and social science to reinvigorate our approaches to building more equitable futures. More specifically, I push back on the politics of violent visibility for marginalized subjects both inside and outside the academy. I argue that texts and images of minoritarian trauma and violence reify the structures of power that created those material conditions to begin with. Utilizing the process of queer of color worldmaking, I suggest that centering minoritarian joy becomes a tool for speaking back toward our current climate of collective crisis. The piece concludes displaying the potential of experiencing and writing through collective joy.

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2021

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2023

This essay turns to reality television to perform trans of color criticism. Taking as its analyti... more This essay turns to reality television to perform trans of color criticism. Taking as its analytic focus the embodied performance – and concomitant mediated production – of whiteness by Asian American drag queen competitor Gia Gunn on the reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Book Chapters by Michael Tristano Jr.

The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, 2023

While QIC scholars interrogate queerness as racialization (Eguchi 2019; Eguchi and Washington 201... more While QIC scholars interrogate queerness as racialization (Eguchi 2019; Eguchi and Washington 2016), which we ought to continue doing, many of us have yet to embrace the onto-epistemic shift required to conceptualize of racialized transness, transsexuality, and gender non-normativity on their own intersectional terms of being and becoming outside of a cis-centric queer theoretical model. Eguchi and Calafell (2020) note that despite developments in trans-centered QIC scholarship (e.g. Johnson 2013; Yep et al. 2015; LeMaster and Mapes 2020; LeMaster et al. 2020; Yep 2013), QIC “continues to require more trans interventions” (p. 7). As such, our meditation offers one such trans intervention. Specifically, we performatively render, through theoretical dances and relational mythmaking, the doing of QIC scholarship. To accomplish this, we turn to two historical moments – across space and time, three decades apart – to explore a relational means by which to foster a sense of healing. The wound to which we attend is onto-epistemic, a wound that calls into question the nature of racialized transness, transsexuality, and gender non-normativity including the embodied means by which trans subjects, queer and otherwise, turn to in order to realize survival even if but for a moment – in our research, teaching, and everyday lives.

Understanding Communication Research Methods, 2022

The chapter guides through both the method and theory of using performance to illuminate communic... more The chapter guides through both the method and theory of using performance to illuminate communication. Students will learn different ways to approach performance as a way of gathering and presenting qualitative data to enact social change. Performance is both method and theory. As a method, performance is a way of collecting data in the field, a way to represent data, a way to resist the status quo, a way to communicate data and/or analysis to an audience, and a type of artifact to analyze. Performance theory helps understand, complicate, resist, and interrogate how individuals, groups, or cultures are represented and constituted. Performance theory includes Goffman’s anticipatory socialization, performances of culture and rituals (e.g., funerals, celebrations, milestones), performativity, performance of identity, and performance of resistance. Performance work is most often within the critical paradigm. The chapter explores the origins of methods of performance starting with oral interpretation and developing into performing identity, performativity, performed autoethnography, and cultural performances. The chapter explains how methods of performance are epistemic and reflexive. The chapter goes into detail on performative writing and how it is useful for critiquing culture and power. The chapter continues with performance pedagogy and its connections to the performance of possibilities.

Book Reviews by Michael Tristano Jr.

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2022

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2020