In celebration of International Transgender Day of Visibility 2020, CBW Collective member Michaela Machicote talks with trans woman warrior, scholar, activist, artist, and story-teller, Dr. Dora Santana, about experiences embodied in language and flesh. Dr. Santana is an assistant professor of Gender Studies at John Jay College CUNY and holds a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies by the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published in the Transgender Studies Quarterly – TSQ – The Issue of Blackness under the title “Transitionings and Returnings: Experiments with the Poetics of Transatlantic Water,” where she emphasizes the healing role of ancestral energies in the African Diaspora as an important embodied knowledge that guides black trans people in their path of resistant and transitioning across imposed limits of gender, geographies and the secular. She also published in TSQ Trans En Las Americas, whose title is "Mais Viva: Reassembling Transness, Blackness, and Feminism." She is currently working on her book, Trans Stellar Knot-works: Afro Diasporic Technologies, Transtopias, and Accessible Futures, where she centers the knowledge production by and on Black trans women in the Black Diaspora through a range of digital and embodied media, especially in Brazil, the U.S., and African countries such as Angola.

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