Abstract How is truth employed as a racialized and gendered regime and how does an alternative form of discourse, such as rumor, become a survival practice and form of knowledge production? Drawing from Sylvia Rivera's talks and interviews, this article theorizes what the author calls survival rumor, or a deviant form of truth-telling in the context of survival. Learning from a self-crafted rumor about Sylvia Rivera that circulated across jail and prison cells, this article argues that survival rumor navigates the structured hostilities that impact trans of color life by strategically leaning into the stigmatized, racialized, and classed assumptions that shape minoritarian discourse. Doing so casts survival rumor as a form of counterattack against the colonial positionings of racialized and gendered discourse and, in turn, creates possibilities for trans life and survival knowledges.
Dan Bustillo (Fri,) studied this question.