Abstract: This co-authored reflection explores how queer and trans BIPOC youth theorize gender, refusal, and survival through sound, silence, and everyday acts of disruption. Written collaboratively by a transmasculine, nonbinary Latinx professor and their transmasculine Latinx PhD supervisee, the piece reflects on an intergenerational moment of co-theorizing sparked by the reading of a canonical text that misrepresented queer youth embodiment. In response, the authors engage in a shared process of listening otherwise—one that centers what youth already know and do. The reflection advances feminist youth engagement by highlighting the epistemic labor young people perform outside of institutional recognition. Through personal narrative, memory, and critical insight, the authors argue that youth do not simply “contribute to” feminist theory—they are already producing it in the margins, in the silences, and in the sonic ruptures that mark their daily survival. The project embodies participatory feminist research by modeling co-theorizing across roles, generations, and embodied experiences.
We didn’t start this project intending to write a reflection, let alone develop a methodology. What we started with was a shared resonance—something felt across time, bodies, and conversations. It began with a text, a hunch, and a kind of queer, trans trust.
Omi had been working through their discomfort with the framing of Chapter Five in Dude, You’re a Fag[1]—a foundational educational ethnography that, while groundbreaking in some ways, left something unspoken, especially in its analysis of girls who “acted like boys.” In Dude You’re a Fag, Pascoe names her intention for the study as exploring masculinity at a high school in the early 2000s. She tells the students she is observing and talking to that she is “writing a book about boys”. When a student duly pointed out to her that “girls can be masculine too, you know”, she paid particular attention to the “Girls Who Act Like Boys”. Rebecca, a student at River High School, becomes the epistemic center for what Pascoe outlines as performing “female masculinity” by taking on gendered expressions that are otherwise carried out by boys on campus. Her baggy clothes, presence on the basketball team, and habit of dating cheerleaders are all read as her acting out an idea of masculinity she sees in other boys rather than a masculinity of her own. This is a disservice done to Rebecca and others who move through her gender embodiment, as Pascoe’s reading of her masculinity is imposed upon Rebecca, as opposed to being recognized as perpetual self-making through masculinity. That chapter’s disservice to Rebecca had always stirred something unresolved, but it wasn’t until I (Omi) passed the book along to Cydney.
This reflection is about that click. About what happens when queer and trans BIPOC thinkers—across generations, across gender embodiments, across academic roles—start listening together. Not just texts, but to the youth they describe. Not just what’s said, but what’s sounded.
We write this reflection to honor that moment of intergenerational, trans pedagogical encounter. It’s about the theory that emerges not from polished arguments, but from shared memory, from refusal, from noise. It’s about how queer and trans youth theorize all the time—in gestures, in jokes, in silence. And it’s about how we must tune our feminist methods to recognize that theory in its raw, relational form. For this reflection, we engage in a queer feminist methodological re/membering – reaching back in time to connect memories of ourselves as queer youth – as Rebecca — in high school to implications of the reading of Rebecca’s masculinity in contemporary contexts. Where the reading of Rebecca stripped her of [agency] over her own masculinity-making, we use re/membering of our own masculinities to do justice to the meaning-making inherent to her gendered embodiments.
Omi:
I didn’t assign the book to class this time. I gave it to Cydney. I knew they would listen differently.
There are certain people who you just know have the ear—not just for analysis, but for care. I had read Chapter Five of Dude, You’re a Fag so many times. I had taught it. Cited it. I critiqued it. But I also avoided it. Something about it had always sat wrong with me.
When I reread that chapter now, I hear the flatness in how Rebeca is described—her “deep voice,” her “swagger,” her “roughness.” I hear the way these are interpreted through “female masculinity,” and how quickly the framing slips into something pathologizing. Rebeca becomes a puzzle to be solved. A figure to be decoded. But never a theorist.
So I gave the book to Cydney. Not to test their critique, but because I knew they would feel the gaps. I knew they’d hear what I had been carrying.
Cydney:
When Omi handed me the book, they didn’t say much. Just, “Let me know what you think of Chapter Five.”
I already knew of the text. It’s everywhere—in educational research, in gender studies syllabi, in conferences about youth culture. But this time it was different. I wasn’t reading it for a class. I was reading it because someone trusted me to hear it otherwise.
I didn’t make it far into the chapter before I started underlining every line about Rebeca’s body, her voice, and the way she moved. She wasn’t just described—she was surveilled. Her gender was interpreted, but it was never truly listened to. I recognized that feeling immediately. Not just from my own life, but from the youth I’ve mentored, the students I’ve coached, the teammates I’ve loved.
Rebeca reminded me of the girls who taught me how to exist. Who wore oversized basketball shorts to the club? Who kissed their teeth and said “’sup Cyd?” like they invented charisma? Who never explained themselves, or even though to have to? I saw their theory in Rebeca. I saw mine too.
And I saw that it had been missed.
Omi:
When we finally talked about it, I didn’t have to explain anything. Cydney knew. Their reading affirmed something I hadn’t yet fully said out loud: that youth like Rebeca aren’t just examples of gender nonconformity. They are feminist theorists. They are architects of refusal.
In the text, Rebeca is tolerated but not understood. Her actions are described but not witnessed. That’s the violence that stuck with me, the institutional framing of her loudness, her “hardness,” as either mimicry or mysticism. Never method. Never world-making.
I had been looking for a way to talk about that tension. And Cydney gave it back to me with language, precision, and a kind of generosity that only comes from lived experience.
Cydney:
There’s a difference between being heard and being recognized. In reading Rebeca’s portrayal, I saw all the ways youth—especially queer and trans BIPOC youth—are documented without being dignified. The text captured her presence, yes. But it reduced her power to performance – something to be watched, judged, and cheered on, but not always for good reason.
That felt familiar. I’ve been called “intense,” “too much,” “mysterious.” I’ve watched my queer youth peers be read through their proximity to boyhood, never through the joy of their becoming. I’ve seen “female masculinity” used to contain what should be celebrated.
And yet, what I saw in Rebeca’s body—her stance, her silence, her refusal to be softened—was theory. Her masculinity wasn’t borrowed. It was built. Her loudness wasn’t disruptive. It was a method of survival.
Reading that chapter, I wanted to shout: “She’s teaching you motherf***ers something!” But the text didn’t make space for that kind of listening.
Omi:
What struck me in our conversations was not just Cydney’s critique of the text, it was how they moved with it. Their attention to Rebeca wasn’t academic. It was embodied. That mattered deeply. It reminded me that feminist theory isn’t just in books. It’s in memory. In relationships. In the pauses between our words. I realized that what I had been trying to teach my students all along—that youth theorize through survival, through style, through sound. This was something I hadn’t fully articulated because I had been waiting for the “right” analytic language.
Cydney’s listening gave me permission to call it what it was: feminist theory. Not future theory. Not a potential theory. But theory already in motion.
Cydney:
There’s a kind of intimacy in reading a text that misunderstands someone you could’ve loved.
Rebeca wasn’t a thoughtful experiment. She was a mirror. I didn’t need to know her whole story to see that she was surviving – to love her as a measurement of loving myself in a way I didn’t know how to yet at Rebecca’s age. Her body carried more than posture; it carried intention. She was not performing masculinity. She was making meaning to what she had.
And I couldn’t help but wonder: what if more researchers had been willing to sit with youth not as data points but as epistemic partners? What if we stopped asking what youth “mean” and started asking what they’re building?
When Omi and I reflected on this together, it felt like we were naming something many of us have felt but rarely get to write about: that feminist theory often begins in the places we were told to ignore—hallways, gym class, side-eye glances, and inside jokes.
Omi:
Those are the spaces where theory hums, where it’s sounded, not stated.
It’s no coincidence that some of the most powerful feminist insights I’ve ever witnessed came not in a seminar room, but in conversations with youth, peers, and co-conspirators like Cydney. What Rebeca did in that school hallway wasn’t a performance. It was a disruption. A refusal to bend her gender into something soft and safe for the school. A refusal to be decoded.
And we saw it because we knew it. Because we had done it, too.
Cydney:
This reflection is a reminder that youth theorizing doesn’t need to be translated into academic language to matter. It doesn’t need to be named “rigorous” to be revolutionary.
I’ve seen kids theorize with their haircuts. With their playlists. With the way they resist being called by the wrong name. With the way they protect each other in moments of harm. I’ve seen youth compose entire philosophies in a single dance circle.
They aren’t waiting for a citation. They’re living it.
Omi:
And our job, as educators, as researchers, as co-conspirators—is to honor that. To listen not just with our ears but with our bodies. To make space for feminist method that begins with sound, with memory, with messiness. To allow our own roles to be disrupted in the process.
Cydney didn’t just respond to the text. They shifted my frame. They named something I had been trying to say for years. And together, we found language to say it.
Not as a finished theory. But as a practice of listening.
We wrote this reflection not to settle anything, but to mark a new beginning in what we are starting to name Jotería listening in education.
A beginning of theorizing with and through youth. Of naming the feminist brilliance they carry in their noise, their refusal, their joy. Of reminding ourselves that the best feminist theory is often made in the spaces we’re taught to overlook.
So this isn’t just a reflection. It’s a commitment.
To keep listening.
To keep learning from those who were never meant to be legible.
To (with)ness.
To sound theory otherwise.
Notes
[1] C.J. Pascoe. Dude, You’re A Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. C.J. Pascoe: University of California Press (2007).
Author Biographies
Dr. Omi Salas-SantaCruz is a sociologist and transdisciplinary education scholar at the University of Utah’s College of Education, working at the intersections of the learning sciences, Latinx studies, transgender studies, and digital literacies. Their research names how infrastructures—from registrar fields and HR portals to search engines—govern recognition and possibility for trans communities, especially trans-Latinx people of color. Omi develops conceptual and methodological tools, such as the Colonial Gender Continuum, Colonial Dysphoria, and terquedad (stubborn persistence), to trace how communities design safety, belonging, and embodied know-how. Their current project, Learning Livable Lives: Transmasculinity as Pedagogy in Faith-Saturated Ecologies, maps the mechanisms and conditions through which transmasculine learners cultivate leadership and livable futures in religiously dense contexts. A committed mentor and community-engaged scholar, Omi founded the JOTA Lab (Justice-Oriented Teaching & Theories in Academia), a methods incubator and writing cooperative that supports graduate students and community partners through lineage mapping, co-analysis, and accessible research practices. They serve as a lead organizer for AJAAS’s 6th biennial conference (2026, Salt Lake City), building partnerships across campus and community. Their publications and public scholarship advance critical social theory in education while offering pragmatic designs that help institutions move beyond inclusion rhetoric toward structural change.
Cydney Y. Caradonna is a Bay Area grown poet, activist, and PhD Candidate in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Utah. Cydney is currently the inaugural Graduate Fellow for the JOTA (Justice Oriented Theories/Teaching in the Academy) Lab, and Consulting Scholar for the Black Feminist Eco Lab at the University of Utah. Cydney’s research interests include: incarceration as gendered violence in/of education, Decolonial Feminist theory and methodologies, and Abolitionist possibilities for educational practice.