Watch a recording of my lecture “Unruly Alliances” from December 3, 2025

On YouTube

This talk addresses how trans and disability poetics can be used to speak against biopolitics and totalitarianism, leading to the development of what I have been calling "unruly alliances" across identity categories. I will first give an overview of the “purification" of the political body occurring today in the US, in which immigrant and trans populations are primary enemy targets. Via a discussion on biopolitics and what I’m calling techno-totalitarianism, I will establish both structural similarities and historiographical differences between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With this knowledge, new ways of accessing individual agency can be discovered through art, as a kind of container for our losses, as well as for our hopes and dreams for a different future. Disability and trans poetics are uniquely capable of speaking against biopolitics and authoritarianism through embodied poetics, which can teach us about how normative regulatory practices attempt to reach all aspects of life-itself, including voice and speech.