Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This essay posits in Vaginal Davis's 1987 video That Fertile Feeling a strategy of resistance to HIV/AIDS rooted in the dynamic of transfeminine pregnancy and fertility, arguing that Davis develops a range of aesthetic strategies for undermining, inverting, and appropriating mainstream discourses of reproduction as they intersect with legal strictures and cultural scripts around normative understandings of embodiment, health, and the notion of morality embedded in the period's dominant set of "family values." AIDS is not, on the surface of things, a central referent in That Fertile Feeling, but the author shows how precisely this submerged status of the crisis as a signifier in the video allows Davis to visualize a broad biopolitical field and situate the epidemic within that field to address the interrelated, mutually supporting injustices perpetuated at its peak in Los Angeles. The figure of the excessively fertile trans woman emerges as useful for theorizing this oblique yet radiant approach to developing a coalitional ethos to confront both the politics around the AIDS crisis in LA at the time and its material and psychic impact.

AbstractThe following is an interview with author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore conducted by Che Gossett and Eva Hayward. Sycamore discusses how she uses fiction to work through historical traumas, inviting readers to imagine the AIDS pandemic as not simply memory but as continuing crisis that necessitates desiring into the archive so that we might begin to understand AIDS. Trauma cannot be historically rendered—this is the catastrophe of this experience, past and present are affectively collapsed—so we must be creative in how we refuse to forget a pandemic that remains ongoing.

Abstract
Editors of the recent publication We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan consider Sullivan's writing as an assertion of transmasculine embodiment and pleasure in gay sex culture via his "portal to historical thinking." With intertextual appearances by Ann Cvetkovich, Elizabeth Freeman, John Giorno, Audre Lorde, José Esteban Muñoz, Liam O'Brien, @archivalrival, and a SCRUFF anon.

Abstract
COVID-19, like HIV/AIDS before it, is being allegorized as a cost of perverse intimacies with nature. This essay surveys three scenes of intimate zoonotic exchange—the jungle, the wet market, and the pork plant—and maps how each contributes to the operation of racial capitalism.

Abstract
The following is an interview with visual performance artist P. Staff conducted by Che Gossett and Eva Hayward. In the interview Staff thinks about kinship and AIDS, "desire and dispossession," AIDS and art, justice and ACT UP, and a trans aesthetics of refusal. How might art and art-making refuse to represent AIDS and trans? How is the imperative to represent trans and AIDS part of the violence of trans/AIDSphobia? Staff questions the progressive projects of social uplift, of well-being, and the endlessly reparative subject. Working through a "trans negativity," Staff's work tracks the corrosive and unbinding force of sexuality that is hidden by contemporary trans and AIDS discourses.

Abstract
The advancement of medical treatments of HIV has given rise to the term undetectability, which has become synonymous with HIV survival and the promise of an otherwise normal life. This article explores the concept of undetectability as it relates to a theory of trans visibility as protection, epitomized by Time Magazine's 2014 declaration of a "trans tipping point." Following critiques that trans visibility offers little guarantee of safety, the author traces the emergence of the term undetectability alongside calls for and against trans recognition. The author grounds arguments about undetectability's possibilities through a critique of the documentary Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), examining its framing as a detective story that seeks answers around Johnson's mysterious death. More specifically, the author analyzes how the murder-mystery form reinforces a carceral fantasy of individual culpability running adjacent to the privatization of HIV as a matter of personal management. The article concludes by turning to Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel's Happy Birthday, Marsha!, not just to pose a divergent narrative frame for Johnson's life but to also understand how undetectability might offer a resource in navigating the violence of exposure itself, toward a space of trans opacity.

Abstract
The following is an interview conducted by Che Gossett and Eva Hayward with Kiyan Williams, multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. William's visual art—sculpture and video—on blackness and ecology, dirt and displacement, brings Black trans poetics, aesthetics, and politics to bear on questions of the afterlife of slavery and plantation geographies. Their work also engages Black trans archives and historicity. Here they discuss their work Reflections on Marlon Riggs, Jesse Harris, Black trans archives, their works Meditations on the Making of America and Trash and Treasure, and their engagement with various artistic mediums.

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.