Graduate Student Lunch with Trish Salah, Trans Literatures: notes towards their emergence

Location:Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk

Trans Literatures: notes towards their emergence.

What does it mean to suggest that transgender literature is now emerging? Or, how can we take stock of what is emerging under the aegis of “Trans”? In this talk I will raise some questions about how processes of selecting, presenting, reviewing and theorizing trans* literary production function to generate a trans* canon as an archive of the present, as well as constituting evaluative and historicizing horizons for how an “emergent” body of literature, and the subjects it purports to represent, will be read. As such it is concerned not only with the questions of a literature's “sudden appearance,” but also with what did not emerge over the last twenty five years, a time during which trans literature was, seemingly, either non-existent or hidden from view.

Trish Salah is a Lebanese/Irish-Canadian feminist writer and educator whose writing addresses trans themes as well as questions of diasporic Arab identity, anti-racism, queer politics and economic and social justice. Her first volume of poetry, Wanting in Arabic, published in 2002 then reissued, won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction in 2014. Roof Books published her second book, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, in 2014.

in partnership with the Graduate Student Gen/Sex Reading Group

Please RSVP for lunch and to receive a copy of the pre-circulated reading: rmcguire@sas.upenn.edu