Coffman’s talk (18 minutes) approaches these questions by building on Susan McCabe’s 2021 reading of early twentieth-century poet H.D. as inscribing what we now call nonbinary identifications and subjectivities. H.D. knew and engaged the ideas of sexologist Havelock Ellis and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud; she critically reworks—rather than uncritically replicates—their theories, using them generatively rather than taxonomically in poems such as “The Master” (written 1933-4) and Trilogy (written and published 1944-6).
“The Master,” about H.D.’s 1933-4 psychoanalysis with Freud, affirms over and against his theories of castration and the masculinity complex that “woman is perfect” (455) and that a nonbinary person— who “is a woman / yet beyond woman”; whose “arms are the waving of the young / male” and who “needs no man” because she is “that dart and pulse of the male” —is “herself perfect” (455-6). In Trilogy, a poem concerned with wartime trauma and the poet’s role in navigating what words both reveal and “conceal” (517), a “mother-father” employs “unsatisfied duality” to encourage the speaker to “‘invent’” new uses of language in response to “a vibration that we can not name” (552-5). These texts initiate nonbinary poetics well before the 1990’s.
Stone’s talk (18 minutes) considers ways that drag and genderqueer life writing drifts between the fields of queer theory and trans studies, evoking both the antinormative subversiveness frequently championed by the former and the material lived experiences often emphasized by the latter. As scholars such as Susan Stryker and Kadji Amin have discussed, these differences have manifested as tensions between queer and trans theorists. Further scholarly attention to drag and genderqueer life writing is necessary to better understand how subjects at the intersection of “queer” and “trans” have grappled with the personal, social, and political potential of these categories and the spaces between them.
This paper considers twentieth- and twenty-first-century life writing by American drag performers and/or genderqueer individuals assigned male at birth with a focus on identifying historical trends in the understanding of drag and genderqueer subjectivity. Stone argues that such texts document an increasing social emphasis in the twenty-first century on enforcing the definitional boundaries among various gendered and sexual identities, while genderqueer individuals themselves persistently express desires to dissolve conflicts and partitions among terms such as “gay,” “queer,” and “trans.” This paper suggests that such desires may provide a model for synthesizing contemporary queer and trans theories.
Harker’s talk (18 minutes) considers ways that science fiction has long been considered a generative space for radical reinvention of gender and sexuality, by authors as diverse as Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Kathryn Forrest, Samuel Delaney, and N.K. Jemison. Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series is an excellent case study for considering the radical potential science fiction has to create a genderqueer, genderfluid, and genderflux imaginary.
Chambers creates multiple species that have distinctive and diverse approaches to gender and sexuality. Some live complex ‘feather families,’ which include polyamory, group sex, and the collective raising of children; in another species, males carry the eggs to term, acting as the primary parent; another has multiple genders, including one that switches between male and female. Chambers’ Wayfarer series embraces the world-making of science fiction to envision multiple forms of gender and sexual diversity beyond the backlash and public hysteria of our current political moment, using a genre that fans have deemed “hopepunk.” Much as online forums have provided Gen Z the opportunity for a radical deconstruction of gender and sexuality, hopepunk is ground zero of genderqueer in the 21st century.