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Abstract
In conversation with Emmett Harsin Drager and Andrea Long Chu's "After Trans Studies," this collaborative essay also turns to questions of field formation and the ethos of trans studies. Situating the growth of the field in the material conditions of precarity under which trans knowledge-workers work, the authors argue that trans studies can't be "over" because, in fact, it isn't yet here. Rather than viewing this as only a dismal proposition, however, they insist that the tenuousness of trans studies provides us with the opportunity to envision and enact more sustaining ways of being "in the field."

AbstractTrans studies is a burgeoning and global interdisciplinary field of scholarship. Although trans people in general continue to remain on the margins of the academy in Canada and the United States, some of the trans scholars who contribute to the field of trans studies are in continuing faculty (tenure-track and tenured) positions. Trans women in general and trans women and trans feminine people of color, in particular, however, are particularly underrepresented in this labor pool. The author brings together a theoretical pastiche consisting of a Black feminist analysis of patriarchy as a layered phenomenon, trans necropolitics, and a masculinity contest culture paradigm to trouble this limit to representation within trans studies in Canada and the United States.

Abstract
Intersex theorist Jules Joanne Gleeson finds Andrea Long Chu's Females: A Concern an indispensable read for those interested in recent struggles around sex and the blossoming of theory that has followed in their wake. While Females makes no pretense at being a comprehensive contribution to gender theory, its brevity and wit seem sure to succeed in causing a stir.

Abstract
This essay argues for reading Kathy Acker in terms of what the author calls the "plasticity" of her sentences. These syntactic structures disclose Acker's attempt to expose and negate a bourgeois ideology of adolescence and maturity. The essay pursues this argument through a reading of Acker's novel In Memoriam to Identity, in particular its interest in Rimbaud as both biographical icon and literary precedent. The essay then argues that Acker's concerted literary attack on an ideology of maturity relates to the projects of trans literature at several critical junctures.

Abstract
The writer Kathy Acker (1947–97) is one of those few in the anglophone canon, or even near it, who opens a space for trans experiences. If trans literature, and literary studies, is to widen their ambits of aesthetic operation, one useful step would be to expand the critical study and literary experiment with such writers. The "Trans | Acker Symposium" at The New School in 2019 was a modest contribution to this project. This text introduces Acker and three of the texts from that event.

Abstract
Is trans studies over? Some scholars claim it was over before it began, swallowed whole by queer studies. Rather than doubling down on a small territorial struggle, this essay tries to make sense of the appeal of such claims on the one hand and the futility of them on the other. Offering a reading of Andrea Long Chu's recent book Females and situating that book within its rather narrow North American context, this essay offers a different view of the present, past, and future of trans studies.

Abstract
This essay contemplates an enduring form of reasoning it titles "egg theory": the type of reasoning that trans people use, prior to transition, to prove transition's impossibility or fruitlessness. It follows this reasoning in a critical and ironic framing in the work of the novelist and critic Sybil Lamb and then, in a less ironic mode, through some essays of Eve Sedgwick and, more broadly, the tranche of queer theory that her work continues to inspire. Egg theory's hostility to the logic of transition inheres in queer theory's own insistence on universality and virtuality as key aspects of queer politics. The essay concludes by considering, through Freud's "Schreber Case" and Dalí's "Metamorphosis of Narcissus," alternatives to egg theory for approaching the condition of the egg before it hatches, the trans person before transition.

Abstract
In 2017, TSQ published its special issue on the convergence of blackness and trans*ness, "The Issue of Blackness." In their introduction, "We Got Issues," editors Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton offer a vision of a black trans* studies that acknowledges twentieth-century black feminist thought as its primary genealogy. For Ellison et al., the move to make black feminism the intellectual center of black trans* studies not only resists black women's persistent erasure from institutional narratives of knowledge making but also opens the contributions of trans* studies onto new fields of possibility for thinking and feeling embodiment, sociality, and memory otherwise. Aiken, Modi, and Polk build on Ellison et al.'s vision for a black trans* studies by bringing the concerns of "The Issue of Blackness" into conversation with recent black feminist critiques of disciplinarity and representation to imagine again how a black trans* studies rooted in black feminism might take shape in the university today.

Abstract
The author explores how current disciplinary conditions force trans studies against queer theory: Because queer theory is the institutional context through which trans studies is invited into the university, it is also the containing ideological architecture against which trans studies must articulate itself. Trans studies is therefore pressed "against" queer theory as a discursive surface in a manner that limits it from being able to exit this disciplinary scenario.

Abstract
This essay offers an overview of trans studies in the United Kingdom in the current climate of transphobia in both academia and the public sphere. This report outlines how trans-exclusionary radical feminist scholars have co-opted the language of victimization and academic freedom following proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act in 2018. The production of ignorance about trans issues and trans studies is a deliberate project abetted by the UK media even on the left. In response, the authors organized an interdisciplinary trans symposium to affirm trans lives and trans studies for students, scholars, and the wider community. The authors reflect on the successes and failures of the event in light of their institution's past as the origin of eugenics founded by Frances Galton and the broader scope of the legacies of the British empire.

AbstractThis piece reports on the "Trans ± Sex: Rethinking Sex/Gender in Trans Studies" symposium held at the University of Arizona in September 2019. It focuses on two major themes that appeared throughout the symposium: cross-generational conflict and the death of the university.

Abstract
When Kathy Acker writes about the body, it is frequently subjected to self-abnegation; there is a sense that the cohesion of self and body hangs on complete destruction and rebirth in terms of its material reality. The figure of the Pirate is an avatar through which Acker explores these tensions, particularly as they relate to her experience of femininity and gender, which, in many ways, aligns with experiences of gender dysphoria. In negotiating the ways in which she would like to be desired with the feminist knowledge that influenced her thought, Acker lays out a path in which the dysphoric body that is assigned female at birth may occupy a third space outside the gender binary. This article puts Acker's writing on the Pirate in dialog with Georges Bataille's figure of the Acéphale to explore the system of knowledge that comes from this subject—one whose articulation is in constant regeneration.