Bo Rittapa (pronouns he/him/his) is an interdisciplinary scholar-artist whose work traces the contours of displacement and materializes resistance from a trans immigrant of color perspective.
Bo’s body of work spans across the mediums of visual art, comics, writing, performance, filmmaking, and culinary business. As an educator and cultural worker, Bo uses critical thinking as a means to situate creative practices and draws upon embodiment and relationality as a source of scholarship. He approaches cultural production as a commitment to working against the grain institutionally, artistically, and interpersonally to cultivate collective resilience from ground up.
Thirteenzero Education is a multifaceted cultural endeavor that indexes Bo’s body of work and activism.
New Publication
My co-authored article with Jacob Lau, “Now You See Me, But You Don’t: Neoliberal Visibility and the Politics of Being Counted,” has recently been published in Feral Feminisms as part of their special issue, “State Killing: Queer and Women of Color Manifestas against U.S. Violence and Oppression.”
The article examines the co-occurrence of the 2010 United States census and Arizona Senate Bill 1070 under President Barack Obama’s administration to unpack how nonnormative exceptionalism, or the practice of petitioning the state to increase the visibility of marginalized subjects, laid the groundwork for President Donald Trump’s violent targeting of vulnerable populations. By analyzing a promotional video that instructs trans people to “come out” on the census and an animated video that critiques U.S. settler colonialism and immigrant exclusion, this article argues that neoliberal visibility divides and conquers marginalized populations through the logic of colonial settlement.
Jacob and I began collaborating on this article ten years ago – we are excited to have finally found a publication home for it! Special thanks to The Pinky Show for inspiring our conversation!