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The bodily ego and the contested domain of the material -- The sexual schema : transposition and transgenderism in Phenomenology of perception -- Boys of the lex : transgender and social construction -- Transfeminism and the future of gender -- An ethics of transsexual difference : Luce Irigaray and the place of sexual undecidability -- Sexual indifference and the problem of the limit -- Withholding the letter : sex as state property

Abstract
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies," revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau‐Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of "maximal grip" that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau‐Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilization of "grip" is a signal of impending loss, and is offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure‐footed mastery. I read Merleau‐Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner's Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip. Finally, the paper turns to Harriet McBryde Johnson's memoir Too Late to Die Young as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise.

This essay considers the difficulties of representing poverty, its conditions and phenomenology, in narrative and asks after the relation between language and poverty. Are there unique pressures on narrative when it is asked to describe deprivation? What are the conditions of its speakability? And what investments and theoretical suppositions attend the assertion of poverty as a position of narrative impossibility, or of asserting the impossibility, for the poor, of inhabiting a speaking subject position? Through a reading of William Vollmann's Poor People and George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, the author asks whether there is a paucity of theory about poverty in contemporary discourses of identity and why that might be so. Orwell and Vollmann each offer a moralist anti-aesthetic and suspicion of rhetorical complexity commonly found in literary representations of poverty, and they represent the poor as subjects dislocated from both voice and temporality, asserting the experience of poverty as that which cannot be given voice and offering the narrator as a figure redeemed from poverty precisely through his narration. If poverty is the end of the future, as Orwell suggests, what temporality does that offer for either the subject or the narrator of poverty?

gayle salamon is the Cotsen lgbt Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. Her areas of specialization are phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and feminist and gender theory. Recent articles include "`Boys of the Lex': Transgenderism and Rhetorics of Materiality," "Transmasculinity and Relation," "The Bodily Ego and the Contested Domain of the Material," and "Gender Aesthetics." She is currently completing a book on embodiment and transgender subjectivity.

gayle salamon teaches in the Women's Studies department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing a manuscript on embodiment and transubjectivity.