(Institutional) Re/production

Reproduction as a social construct moves through people and institutions. As a result, people who are trapped in cycles of institutional violence may oftentimes be complicit in their furtherance, albeit without intent, malice, or blame. In some ways, those of us who are fetishized, commodified, and/or exoticized by institutional harm cannot help but be caught up in cyclical patterns of institutional harm. In this article, I detail my own personal narrative of this cycle, engaging memory work as a mode through which to remember and retell how institutional reproduction presses upon trans women. I then engage notions of freedom dreaming as one potential practice for imagining otherwises, elsewheres, and henceforwards unmarked by such reproductions.