As Gayle Salamon reminds us in Assuming a Body: Transgender and the Rhetorics of Materiality (2010), grammar is a primary site where gender organizes the social. Salamon writes, “Social construction becomes something akin to a grammar lesson, and the active work of living a gender is seen as a poetic opposition to a strict grammar of gender as legislated somehow from above.” Extending Salamon, to exist as a trans person is to intervene continuously at the meeting point of language and materiality even under duress of state violence; it is to experiment with language, to engage in a poetic act. As Finn Enke argues in their contribution “translation” in the inaugural “Keywords” issue of TSQ (2014), trans people continuously rupture received language, “in order to carry or bring across, we become poets, storytellers, and artists.”
This panel gathers emerging and established scholars in the field of trans studies who detail its interrelationships with Black studies, queer critique, ecocriticism, visual culture studies, and life writing, in order to theorize approaches to state violence and human rights that center the formal mechanisms of trans genders and language practices as strategies for negotiating oppressive political contexts. In so doing, these four papers together demonstrate the importance of trans theories of language to intersectional readings of political and social resistance. To facilitate discussion and allow for a broad range of approaches to trans experiments with language, this panel includes four short papers of approximately 12 minutes each, which will leave a substantial period of time for questions and discussion.
The panel’s first paper explores a genealogy of trans genre experimentation from Black studies and trans critique, focusing in particular on Sandy Stone and Sylvia Wynter’s work. Poet and trans studies scholar Trish Salah begins by discussing the interplay of differing modes of trans genre experimentation through critical itineraries inaugurated by Wynter and Stone to consider their possible conversation in contemporary trans poetics. Salah will trace trans experimental practice from Wynter and Stone to recent work that explores the necropolitical economies of sexuality and gender subtending the (re)-vitalization of normativities, homo-, hetero-, cis- and trans* (Snorton 2017). In doing so, Salah alerts us to the “profitable brutalities” (McKittrick 2015) of coloniality and anti-Blackness, and their dense interpenetration and inter-animation of the Human, and its generic MAN (Wynter 2003). Salah builds her reading on Stone’s field generating essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto” where Stone frames transsexuality as “as a genre, a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored” (1987).
Poet and trans studies scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich turns attention to the status of the “trans we,” as he considers how trans has long been marked by a certain measure of trouble with the social, which, in turn, gets trans in trouble. Rather than trying to make trans more properly extroverted, however, his paper takes an interest in the forms of sociality found in withdrawal. Tracing formal connections between the life/writing of early trans man Michael Dillon and contemporary trans[masculine] poets, Awkward-Rich excavates a lyric model of trans subjectivity that recognizes, rather than sidesteps, the vexed nature of the social in trans thought. In particular, he argues that the lyric “we,” which recurs in trans writing across time and genre, has long enabled trans experiments in self-making and self-recognition in the absence of social worlds able to provide that vital function.
The third presentation animates the gendered logics of environmental risk through experimental writer and musician Julian Brolaski’s poetry. In his paper, trans studies scholar Davy Knittle reads Brolaski’s Gowanus Atropolis (2011) to develop a “trans urban ecology.” Knittle considers Brolaski’s advocacy for a situated ecological reading that understands non-cisgender identification as part of racialized, classed, and networked urban ecologies. Knittle argues further that Brolaski’s asyntactic writing is both call and strategy for environmental critique that refuses compulsory cisnormativity, and which takes the deviance of trans approaches to environmental risk and histories of economic disinvestment that have characterized global cities as crucial strategies for confronting both environmental racism and the structures of state violence that produce it.
In the session’s final presentation, trans studies scholar Cole Rizki reads the Argentine Transgender Memory Archive Project (2012 to present) to consider the aesthetic practices trans activists cultivate within a political context hyper-saturated by state violence. Rizki focuses in particular on the structuring effects of state violence on “transgender” in the wake of Argentine dictatorship that resulted in the elimination of thirty thousand citizens between 1976-83, who are collectively known as “the disappeared.” Rizki’s paper tracks how contemporary transgender activists deploy and revise historical narratives of national trauma to stake gender rights claims in the present. In so doing, he turns to trans visual practices and poetics as a key archive from which to theorize loss and resistance in post-dictatorship Argentina.
The sessions's presider, Heather Love, is a key figure in the fields of queer and trans studies whose work in these fields, and in the sociology of literature, sits at the intersection of these papers’ approaches and use of trans critique.