Exhaustion, Exhausting Temporalities, and Young Trans People’s Everyday Lives in the UK

Abstract

In this article, young trans people share their experiences of exhaustion and exhausting temporalities. Drawing on participatory research with young trans people aged fourteen to twenty-five in London and Scotland, I trace forces implicated in the spatial and bodily emergence and fixity of exhaustion in young trans people’s lives to the sociomaterialities, embodied practices, and architectures of many everyday spaces, alongside societal hostilities, as a set of forces that often (attempt to) erode their agency and contribute to their “out-of-placeness.” I also undertake a queer reconceptualizing of the condition that emphasizes the specificities of the bodies, subject positions, and spatial interactions of exhausted people. Crucially, this reconceptualization recognizes that experiencing and embodying exhaustion can, perhaps paradoxically, initiate and make possible myriad potentialities, complicating academic work that positions exhaustion as the removal of possibility. The article reflects on the radical flourishing of trans youth lives, spaces, solidarities, and euphoric experiences by exploring participants’ (re)making of resilient, resistive, and restorative subjectivities, embodiments, and spatialities within exhaustion’s spatial and temporal pervasiveness. By illuminating exhaustion’s nonlinear, messy, and prolonged temporalities, I observe that such temporalities constitute a function of lived exhaustion while paradoxically providing conditions for such empowering, expansive, and often queer and transspecific potentialities.