I am broadly interested in understanding, through a materialist transfeminist lens, the futures—nihilistic, utopian, and everything in between—that we, as queer and trans people, imagine for ourselves. Where can these visions be found—speculative fiction, punk rock, anarchist zines—outside of academia's traditional mining grounds? What pressures are they formed under? How do these pressures make them vulnerable to recapture? And what, or rather who, do they leave out?
Ursula K. Le Guin writes that science fiction is not an attempt at extrapolation but an extended thought experiment by the novelist: “[it] is not predictive; it is descriptive.”³ Yet sci-fi is not only about the here and now; a glimpse into the collective reimaginary, it is as much about what could be—in a future world, or a different one—as what is. This dialectic is essential to understanding how sci-fi can complement theory.
I have lived in more than a dozen places, but if I am from anywhere, it is Seattle, and the moss and petrichor of the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park. I love speculative fiction,⁴ punk rock,⁵ queer and trans literature,⁶ woodworking, and anything even tangentially related to my fiancée, Nicha. I am Tamil, a butch lesbian, and a trans woman.
As a mathematician, I worked in a number of areas, including combinatorics, graph theory, and quantum complexity theory. I conducted research at Stanford, Brown, and Northwestern, and published in Discrete Mathematics. I remain interested in the use of logic in formal and social epistemology.
You are welcome to contact me at truax [at] berkeley [dot] edu, if your inquiry is related to my research, and r [at] truax [dot] io otherwise. |
⁴ See The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.
⁵ See the demo or the album Trans Day of Revenge by Girls Living Outside Society's Shit.
⁶ See Girlfriends by Emily Zhou.