DISRUPTIVE BODIES, DISRUPTIVE TEXTS: TRA

Until the mid-twentieth century, philosophies of embodiment failed to think through the morphology of trans bodies and lives, leaving trans experience, in a sense, “un-worded” in the critical imagination. Disruptive Bodies, Disruptive Texts: Trans Imaginings will examine how trans creatives have responded to this silence, rethinking cis-centric theories of embodiment to unearth innovative “vocabulary” for those lives and bodies long erased from archives and linguistic intelligibilities. Indeed, even in its representations of silence and loss for trans experience, the archive demands a certain attention: What is held in the weight of silence? How do such silences, or rather “silencings,” inform trans embodiment? Is transness destined to forever see itself bound up in hauntings, in violence?

The US publishing industry favours trans narratives that operate within traditional memoir or political and activist nonfiction. Yet, transness, in its disruption of supposed bodily norms, powerfully destabilises essayistic conventions. What is trans nonfiction when its written for us and by us? How then do we define trans nonfiction? What is transness at the level of the sentence, the paragraph? What textures, dimensions, or discussions does it bring to nonfiction as form, genre, and critical discourse? Disruptive Bodies, Disruptive Texts: Trans Imaginings will explore transness not only as content but as syntax, as form. The course will consider those works of trans creation that remove cis-lenses for approaching, organising, and understanding trans experience and literature. Instead, we will consider how the trans body emerges as rich centre from which to rework ideas of embodiment and essay form. And from that centre we will disrupt.

Each week, students will receive a generative prompt (either to complete in class or after) specific to the themes and concerns of the relevant reading materials. These are opportunities to experiment as the work will not be workshopped or critiqued.

Twice during the semester, students will lead discussions on assigned books, craft essays, and criticism and theory. At the end of the term, students will submit a final portfolio consisting of a project of their own design.