Poems have subjects. They are about things, at least if we agree with Rainer Diana Hamilton’s essayistic poems in God Was Right, which rebuke the devil’s advocates by arguing in defense of such obvious, uncontroversial truths.1 The poem “2nd Essay on Bad Writing” imagines a genre termed “Fictional Poetry,” defined by “a quality of aboutness / that prevents overemphasis on form” and thus “resists the belief that the shape a poem takes / is always the source of its politics / interestingness / literariness / purpose.” Whereas even the most plotless fiction tends to be read with some consideration of its ostensible content (“no one is surprised that / fiction is about things,” Hamilton writes),2 critics often imagine that experimental poetry might be capable of evading aboutness more sharply, producing unstable language of indeterminate reference and thereby challenging all manner of ideological hegemonies. Jan Mieszkowski, for instance, writes of the poetry of Paul Celan that such texts offer the possibility of “a discourse in which aboutness would no longer be sovereign.”3 Hamilton thus seemingly shrugs off an avant-garde formalism that renders aboutness subservient or even superseded altogether, averring unabashedly that “the books I want to write / about don’t mind being about things: about love, / about childbirth, about borders, about sex, about gossip.”4 The question here is not whether or not books are about things—they are—but rather whether they mind being known in their aboutness, whether aboutness is permitted to serve as the frame for reading.
Whether or how the book itself minds its aboutness, of course, is a different question than the reception of such aboutness by readers. In a recent essay, Nathan Wainstein argues that critics deploy a special sense of aboutness to reveal what he calls “nonobvious literal content” and assert that content’s centrality to the work’s meaning as a whole.5 Wainstein argues that this usage (as in Cynthia Chase’s claim that, “of course,” George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda is “patently” about “history”) works because it “broadcasts obviousness while noting the nonobvious,” appearing to make a “minimally interpretive” claim when in fact it “transforms the text metonymically: it represents the whole work through one of its parts.”6 History is certainly present in Daniel Deronda; to say that the novel is about history is necessarily to make a larger, more controversial claim about the novel’s significance, structure, and point of emphasis. Disagreements regarding a novel’s aboutness, however, are categorically distinct from Hamilton’s claim that poetry has aboutness at all. The trouble is not that topics like history, love, childbirth, etc. are uniquely difficult for poems to represent.7 Rather, Hamilton’s seemingly obvious claim is still controversial because certain proponents of avant-garde poetry consider it to be non-representational by nature, and thus cannot be said to be about anything at all, or perhaps are only about the surface and sound of language.
This essay argues that such problems of aboutness take a unique form in contemporary trans poetry, which has inherited, on the one hand, the formal legacies of various strains of poetics that seek to disrupt the referentiality of language, and on the other hand, the political lessons of the risks involved in representational art for so-called minorities. I make the obvious point that aboutness is determined not only by the text’s formal approaches to referentiality, but also by the status of the text’s content and the author’s identity as political representations. These problems often emerge in statements of what the poem is not about: consider the difference between saying that Clark Coolidge’s The Crystal Text is not really about a crystal and the claim made in Trish Salah’s blurb for A Queen in Bucks County that Kay Gabriel is not writing “about being trans.”8 The latter faces a special kind of suspicion: that the lady is protesting too much. Denials of trans aboutness seem to be framed by their resistance to the pigeonholing of trans art as a trans expression of the trans artist’s trans body, a move which the editors of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility associate with a contemporary culture industry that offers representation in bad faith as a substitute for real power.9 Thus, Gabriel and Andrea Abi-Karam’s introduction to We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics states that they “refuse in advance the imperative of representation that the publishing industry places on trans literature” and seek to move past “certain trans lit clichés: coming out narratives, for instance, or testimonies to the private experience of dysphoria.”10 Such clichés threaten to fix the aesthetic significance and political function of trans writing, such that any over-familiar sign of trans difference could doom the work to a reductionist, vampiric interpretation.
Avoidance of such clichés emerged so early in the formation of trans cultural production as a definite field that it is almost a cliché itself. Already in 1997, well before the so-called “tipping point” of public recognition, Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillipa organized an arts festival to exhibit work that was not “necessarily about transsexual/transgender issues… [but] made by transsexual artists.”11 Trans poetry as a collective endeavor might begin from a foundational sense that representation risks reductionism, that trans literature cannot just be about trans life. This is because trans poetry emerges after many iterations of debates about the role of representation in women’s, ethnic, and other minority literatures which faced bad-faith readings of being “merely” about oppression, difference, or group affiliation.12 Rather than simply rebuke representation and its alliance with the dominant form of trans memoir (its narrative of individual medical transition makes it all too obviously a text about being trans), much of the work in contemporary trans poetry still centers visible signs of trans experience, embodiment, and desire, even while critically pressuring representative frameworks. In what follows, I take up this tension as it manifests in two recent works: Syd Staiti’s Seldom Approaches and Nora Treatbaby’s Our Air. Both works are full of trans material (hormones, pronouns, genitalia) yet explicitly challenge readings that would use such material to determine that the work is about being trans. Such challenges, I argue, reveal a different form of aboutness than the one that identifies the work’s central meaning, while also demonstrating that engagement with trans clichés often serves as an opportunity to critique liberal models of representation rather than being merely absorbed into their framework.
*
One is tempted to say that Syd Staiti’s Seldom Approaches opens in media res, but it would be more precise to say that it opens with an examination of the concepts of middleness and centrality. Staiti writes:
In the center of a bridge, I’m standing
—standing on the bridge centered—
looking one way and the other
In center, my body is a mass that lies between
water, metal, mud, bone
—that lies between two categories, dead, calcified to the skin—
And the text is a bridge, between
the last thought and the next
In center, a gender—13
As Staiti later notes (29), the image of standing on a bridge begins and ends his first book, The Undying Present, but the difference suggested by its repetition at the beginning of his second volume is revealed in our search for the center, which fractally emerges throughout the book until beginning, middle, and end give way to a sense of continual transition. What is at the center of this bridge or text? We are given three possible answers: “I,” “my body,” and “a gender,” each quite distinct, but plausibly fungible with the others with some level of referential stability. It seems obvious that whatever is at the text’s center will also be a good candidate for its aboutness, but Staiti immediately moves from verse into prose in order to trouble such an assumption: “I think about writing a book alongside myself—not a book about transition, but a book composed of the writing done as it’s happening” (5). In order to not be about transition, this book, which we gradually gather is the one we are reading, would seemingly seek to decenter that gender on the bridge, and yet Staiti’s denial of trans aboutness is directly preceded by a description of taking testosterone. In denying aboutness, then, Staiti does not feel the need to edit out the details of trans life. Rather, he raises questions about the text’s center and the kinds of prepositions that guide our attempts to locate it: what is the difference between a book about transition and a book alongside it?
Staiti’s preference for the latter formulation is rooted in a sense that both transition and writing are open-ended processes with unstable boundaries, processes that influence each other in a complex feedback loop. Such a view suggests the impossibility of locating a single center: the book is alongside transition just as much as it is alongside all the various experiences that enter its timespan—political conflicts, psychic breaks, road trips, revolutionary fantasies. Staiti then goes further in suggesting the possibility of abandoning prepositions altogether, forgoing the neat separation of “writing about transition” for the messy entanglement of what we might call simply “writing transition” or “transition writing.” Staiti writes:
In 2017 and 2018, I write shards of poems beside my transition. I don’t care to write about the transition (though of course, that comes through). I want the book to be it, to embody it. I want the book to bear the marks of my experience—messy, uncategorizable, noncontiguous, resistant to expected or dominant forms, ambivalent yet resolute in its right to exist. The book and the body in communion, two interwoven texts… Misreadings of the transitioned body, and of the open text, are inevitable. Nevertheless, the textual body and the warm supple book continue to demonstrate that they live—thrive, even— on their own self-made terms…
I still work on the collection of shards about gender and transition. I decide it belongs in the center of the book and title it “—”, like a bridge… Then the house is renovated and the shards move to the front… I’m reminded that I thought, from the very beginning, that the whole book is a bridge. (74–75)
Halfway through the book, Staiti reshuffles our sense of a center and also seems to begrudgingly acknowledge some trans aboutness as inevitable. In attempting to collapse the distance between text and body, however, Staiti suggests that the book actually is all of the things that it is supposedly only about. Staiti’s linking of the “textual body” with the “warm supple book” itself draws on an association almost as ubiquitous as the linking of trans writing with the genre of memoir: the transgender text as inherently trans-genre, bearing a trace of the author’s hybridity. Staiti’s choice to juxtapose representational and anti-representational modes rather than choosing one path, however, refuses a simplistic association of trans writing with either conventional or hybrid form, thereby destabilizing the coherence and independence of such forms.
By acknowledging the givenness of both these forms rather than endorsing one of them, Staiti’s book arrives as a kind of belated trans synthesis of, among other similar cases, the 1991 debate between Ron Silliman and Leslie Scalapino, wherein the former claims that minority writers are more likely to employ conventional literary forms due to a political need for representation, while the latter claims that minority writers are more likely to question the transparency of representational discourse and thereby write in experimental forms.14 Instead of taking independent formal possibilities (say, conventional-representational and experimental-deconstructive) and assessing whether or not various social classes of writers will embrace one or the other, Staiti’s juxtaposition suggests that both formal traditionalism and experimentalism are mediated by certain kinds of overdetermining content (race, gender, and sexuality being some evident examples) whose presence or absence in the poem is not merely a matter of the words on the page. Rather than being a special kind of content, then, trans aboutness is a challenge to the clean separation of content from form, suggesting that the problem of aboutness goes beyond the mere identification of the content or subject matter of a work. The extent to which a poem will be read as being about transness may not be decided by aesthetic techniques so much as it is by the historical situation in which transness does or does not carry a certain representational valence, a historical situation that also constructs the ideas of form and content themselves.15 Indeed, Staiti’s emphasis on transition as process is intended to highlight its durational nature, a personal temporality explicitly associated with the longue durée of history, described as “a transition that lasts for millennia” (56). Just as Staiti is trying not to write about transition, he writes that he is “struggling to write about 2016, that it’s all a fog, that nothing happened” (53). Seldom Approaches is not “patently about history,” per se, but its concern with trans aboutness exists inextricably alongside its concern with history and the impossibility of its representation.
Writing about 2016, of course, is writing about many things: the personal experience of early transition, Oakland’s communal grieving of those lost in the Ghost Ship tragedy, the global rightward turn encapsulated in the figure of Donald Trump. Staiti’s text makes the layers of these historical traces explicit in a manner that Lindsay Choi has compared to the poet’s “introducing a poem that you’re about to read.”16 Such verbal introductions provide context or even directly explicate aboutness (“This next one is about…”), but Staiti’s are unique in that they provide an excess of aboutness, nearly allowing the context to displace the poem entirely or become its own poem. Such an effect is achieved in transcripts of two readings Staiti gave on December 9, 2016 and January 17, 2009. In the 2016 reading, Staiti is reflecting on Ghost Ship and recalls the 2009 reading: “As I sit here trying to write about anything other than grief, I remember another time where I was scrambling to write before a reading… The reading was about an orgy but it wasn’t really about an orgy. It was more about poets” (59). He also introduces the 2009 reading by way of a reflection on its apparently inevitable relation to external, contemporaneous events: “[This talk is] about practice. It’s about integrity. It’s about insecurity. It’s about Gaza. Why haven’t I said anything about Gaza. But how could I possibly say anything about Gaza” (70). The impossible aboutness of Gaza or 2016 at first seems quite different from the inevitable aboutness of transition or grief, but Staiti connects them by making the problem of their aboutness one of representing physical experience. After a laundry list of forms of structural violence, Staiti writes: “But I don’t want to talk about these things right now, though I think about them a lot. I want to know what devastation feels like in your body” (63). Like the shift from “writing about transition” to “writing transition,” this formulation exchanges the inevitable aboutness of trans misrepresentation for the impossible aboutness of representing the link between specific bodily feelings and the broader movements of history.
The difficulties of representation here are not, however, attributed to an unsurpassable horizon of trans difference; they are common problems that emerge in the attempt to represent experience. For Staiti, then, writing transition seeks to represent the material experience of transition while demanding that the reader’s attention turn towards an unrepresentable network of physical traces that link the body to history. The reader is perhaps asked to make a similar leap from reading about transition to the more intimate act of reading transition. Displacement of focus from the represented subject to the process of representation is a perennial avant-garde strategy for troubling the logic of aboutness, but it raises the question of what non-representational relation the poem still has to its subject. Lyn Hejinian notes that poetry “calls conventional notions of ‘aboutness’ into question,”17 and she perhaps suggests an unconventional notion in a line from My Life: “One would not read the book unless one already understood it.”18 Staiti’s turn towards the representational difficulties of historical experience may suggest not that such phenomena can never be represented, but indeed perhaps that they may not need to be, since the reader may already understand them on a tacit or pre-verbal level. One problem with writing about transition, then, is that it assumes a reader who wants to read about it as a topic separate from themself. Writing transition, by contrast, asks for a reader who will read transition into their own experience, one who already understands, which is not to say a reader who is transgender.
*
There is a giddy dizziness accompanying the thought that transition is about everything that shares its historical context, but there may also be concern that the particularity of transition might disappear or be rendered (as it so often has) a mere allegory of fluidity in general.19 Staiti’s gambit is to mix allegorical symbols (bridges, swamps, buildings) with concrete imagery (syringes, surgeries, facial hair) so as to refuse both overgeneralization and pigeonholing, and he explicitly synthesizes the two forms of writing in a metacommentary reminiscent of Renee Gladman or Marguerite Duras. In her debut book, Our Air, Nora Treatbaby takes a slightly different approach to trans aboutness, employing all of the gender jargon of contemporary trans life but using it almost as if she is not quite sure what any of it means. Such defamiliarization occurs, however, not via the distancing of formalist experimentation but rather by the offering of familiar poetic experiences (praise, epiphany, etc.) that construct trans embodiment as a resignifying lens through which we view landscapes partly framed by capitalism’s enclosure of the natural world. In the first poem, “Philosophy,” Treatbaby considers the inextricability of the trans interior from the broader world, one which is paradoxically both pastoral and industrial:
nature is a pill
I was made to swallow it.
have I nothing to do with
what’s inside of me?20
The question implies a potential alienation from the obscure inner workings of the body’s digestion of nature’s pill, though it also amounts to an admission that the swallower is ineluctably involved with her inscrutable insides. The simultaneity of estrangement and relational identification appears throughout the book, both in reference to the conditions of production that shape the body and to its imbrication in language:
being a woman is
an implausible dream
it is not something you
become / are assigned
it is just an insane vibration (6)
This quasi-mystical gender theory may at first appear to embrace the association of trans bodies with perpetual flux, boundary-crossing, and uncategorizability. What Treatbaby makes clear throughout her book, however, is that her declaration of womanhood as an “insane vibration” may actually represent a gesture towards aboutness rather than opacity, one which risks the exposure of representation in order to seek intimacy and relation.
At the end of “Philosophy,” after a series of fragmentary and elliptical meditations, Treatbaby stages a scene of determined intention, almost a promise:
lost as I am in the specificity of air, I take breath and it is a fluency. I abandon my felicity with language for the dumb as shit truth and emit only the clean sound of sentiment. (16)
At the end of a poem and the start of a book, the poet announces the abandonment of verbal adornment, offering the dumb truth by trading linguistic felicity for the fluency of mere breath. Our Air does and does not live up to this promise, and its particular cunning lies in showing the ways in which the truth of trans embodiment cannot be adequately expressed via modified or elevated language and instead irrepressibly emerges in the physical relations that speech implies. Often, this double movement occurs through the juxtaposition of poetical speech with its vulgar counterpart: “cuneiform of the torso / when I think of my boobs / I become horny and sad” (5), or “I collapsed from / a fathom of my / own abundance in panties / (balls falling out)” (23). In the first instance, the cryptic hieroglyph of the trans body appears in its exotic, embodied script (elsewhere, “the pronoun is a / sculptural demon” [7]), yet then immediately appears in sentimental everyday language. In the second, the metaphor of abundance is parenthetically literalized by naming the excess flesh of external genitalia that cannot fit in one’s panties—celebrating, crying, and laughing at the inability of the trans body to not stick out. We might therefore modify hannah baer’s assessment that Our Air is “queer without being obvious”21 by claiming that the book is in fact quite obvious about its trans aboutness, but that it surprises us because it risks believing that a whole-hearted embrace of this obviousness might offer the radical potential and gentle respite of a relationality in which there would be no need to conceal the bulge in one’s panties.
Treatbaby occasionally feigns at avoiding trans clichés, only to take the opportunity to mention them and consider how it might feel to accept them. This dynamic reaches its heights in the long poem “Of”:
I would never use the word “body” in a poem but then I saw AMAB carved into the bark and was rerouted to my sexual god-form. (30)
Treatbaby’s promise to forbid or forgo the cringe of writing about embodiment melts in response to an absurd occurrence wherein she finds a unity between ancient nature and the very-recent language of purportedly constructed identities, an experience that does not merely return her to her body but transforms it into a kind of vehicle for transcendent experience (recalling the “insane vibration”). The trick of retreating into transcendence both brackets and highlights the thorny mess of trans life, with its constrained conditions for poetic expression. After all, the question of what it means to use the word “body” depends upon the possible uses to which it can be put, the sorts of meanings it can signify in a given social context.
For Treatbaby, on the one hand, the fixing power of language seems inseparable from the social ontology of cis-normative gender, such that “even my pussy / has a name” (20), a name that may or may not get to be “pussy.” On the other, the possibility of names being used differently may therefore offer ontological possibilities as well as linguistic ones: “restored from the / genre of specifics / I vagina like / nobody’s watching” (28). The verbing of “vagina” shrugs off the specificity of assignations, inclusive or otherwise, and inaugurates a linguistic mode wherein gendered words can now name activities and processes that escape classification. Of course, gendered terms like “vagina” still signify in their obvious, expected ways, and Treatbaby is here playing with their ability to oversignify, a playful excess akin to the genital abundance. If it seems like we are back at the trope of the trans body as an obscure flux offering the freedom of opacity, we need to pay closer attention to the enjambment in the last two lines. On its own, “I vagina like” implies mimesis, a conception of transition as adequation to existing gender norms, while also sneaking in a double entendre by using inverted word order to declare a sapphic passion. When “nobody’s watching” arrives, however, we realize that “like” meant “as if,” and that the imagined possibility of vaginaing is both liberatory (in conjuring a reprieve from hyper-visibility) and deflating (in that the presence of the audience is obvious).
Thus, the verbing of “vagina” does not simply announce a fluidity spanning body and language, but is in fact multiply framed by the scrutinizing fixity of an external gaze, to which Treatbaby responds with a wry but steadfast embrace of the “dumb as shit truth” that ends the book: “we are each other” (81). The “dumb / truth” arrives again in “Of” to rewrite the word “body” as a condensation of the book’s relational motto: “A body is just / replacement space / for the limitless truth / of each other” (49). Treatbaby’s turn to the body, then, only appears to risk the reductionism of trans aboutness as pure difference; in fact, her notion of embodiment means to encompass a nearly universal continuum of solidarity that might dissolve the specificity of transness altogether in its view of the social totality. Of course, such transcendence is manifestly impossible, and the poems’ main interest turns out to be in staging its continual failure precisely by deflating their ascensions into universality with intrusions of sexed and gendered jargons, a comic structure that allows Treatbaby to winkingly ask: “Is being trans / important?” (48) Given the transcendental maneuvers of her poems, Treatbaby’s rhetorical question allows us to wonder if it might be answered in the negative, short-circuiting the logic by which the poem or poet’s being trans would automatically serve as a meaningful frame for interpretation.
But since so much of her poetics is both animated and interrupted by the linguistic and material constraints of trans expression, we have to ultimately answer her: of course, obviously, duh. The presence of trans aboutness is important for our reading, not because we can integrate and interpret it coherently at either a formal or thematic level, but because it sticks out and interrupts our reading while also suggesting an alternate mode. Traditional deployments of representation in trans writing were supposedly designed to produce a kind of empathy and identification that agreed to look past trans difference by viewing it as the unchosen tragedy of a medical condition; instead, Treatbaby’s relational poetics risks presenting trans experience as a vague, weird vibe in order to attempt a more playful, comic affiliation that dedramatizes the unique particularity of transness while nevertheless insisting on it as a meaningful frame. Such a poetics clearly seems to hold different views of representation, identification, and empathy than the model of liberal inclusion that would accept the trans subject as an aggrieved minority; it may become more relevant as the failures of that liberal model become increasingly obvious.
As baer’s comment about Our Air suggests, one judgment that lurks beneath the aversion to a poem’s trans aboutness is the closely-related aversion to obviousness, particularly in the fear of the bad faith reading that would foreclose polysemy in advance by judging that a trans poem is obviously just about being trans, and thus obvious in a pejorative sense. One response to this bad faith reading is to insist on the nuance and complexity of the work, an insistence that often seems to tempt us to displace its trans specificity by repudiating aboutness and aiming at formalist universals. Another response is to accept the obvious transness of the trans poem, and render that undeniable surface polysemous by playing up the forces producing its obviousness.22 Such a poetics evokes similar embodied problems and strategies endemic to the complexities of transition; for instance, one might attempt to conceal an obvious transness by producing the most obvious gender markers of the opposed sex, but the miniskirt or mustache always threatens to become an excessively obvious attempt that then announces the visibility of transness all over again.23 In those precious instances when they are not fearfully framed by the threat of violence, trans aesthetics often produce styles that emphasize complex tensions between these various forms of obviousness, exploring their possibilities while also encountering their limits. In both evading and evoking the question of whether the trans poem is about being trans, recent trans poetry often achieves a similar effect: transness and aboutness are shown as inevitable frames for reading that nevertheless fail to determine the poem’s meaning. More prominent in our moment, perhaps, than a simple embrace of opacity, neutrality, or negation is a poetics that knowingly avows its all-too-obvious trans aboutness while also insisting that those qualities are partial, polysemous, and contested.
Notes:
- Rainer Diana Hamilton, God Was Right (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), 90. ↩︎
- Hamilton, God, 91. ↩︎
- Jan Mieszkowski, “All about Über,” MLN 133, no. 5 (2018), 1165. ↩︎
- Hamilton, God, 90. ↩︎
- Nathan Wainstein, “Aboutness: Death Stranding, Literality, and Labor,” Representations 170, no. 1 (2025), 69. ↩︎
- Wainstein, “Aboutness,” 70. ↩︎
- Although for more on the particular representational difficulties inhering to war and questions of aboutness, see Kent Puckett, War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939–1945 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). ↩︎
- Kay Gabriel, A Queen in Bucks County (New York: Nightboat Books, 2022). ↩︎
- See Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton’s introduction in Trap Door (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), xv-xxvi. ↩︎
- Gabriel and Andrea Abi-Karam, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (New York: Nightboat Books, 2020), 2, 5. ↩︎
- Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillipa, quoted in Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky’s “Our Own Words: Fem & Trans, Past & Future,” e-flux 117 (2021), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/117/387257/our-own-words-fem-trans-past-future/. ↩︎
- While I lack the space to articulate this history, a list of such earlier moments would include, say, George Eliot’s 1856 “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and Langston Hughes’s 1926 “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” ↩︎
- Syd Staiti, Seldom Approaches (Olympia, WA: The Elephants, 2022), 3. Hereafter cited in-text. ↩︎
- See Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman, “What/Person: From an Exchange,” in A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998, ed. Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 378–92. ↩︎
- On historical shifts in the dialectic between form and content, see Fredric Jameson’s introduction to The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), ix–xxi. ↩︎
- Lindsay Choi, “Syd Staiti,” Full Stop, May 23, 2023, https://www.full-stop.net/2023/05/23/interviews/lindsayc/syd-staiti/. ↩︎
- Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 2. ↩︎
- Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2002), 58. The line bears a resemblance to Fredric Jameson’s claim that one never encounters the text on its own, but always through preexisting narrative frames, thus suggesting that form is the sedimentation of content. See “Preface” in The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1983). ↩︎
- On problems with transness as allegory, see Emma Heaney, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). ↩︎
- Nora Treatbaby, Our Air (New York: Nightboat Books, 2024), 1. Hereafter cited in-text. ↩︎
- hannah baer, “Nora Treatbaby Can Make Your Poetry Readings a Little Less Boring,” Interview, March 15, 2024, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/literature/nora-treatbaby-can-make-your-poetry-readings-a-little-less-boring. ↩︎
- I have written about similar dynamics in my “Uses of Obviousness in Seven Controlled Vocabularies,” in “Tan Lin,” ed. Jennifer Soong, cluster, Post45: Contemporaries (2024), https://post45.org/2024/08/uses-of-obviousness-in-seven-controlled-vocabularies/. ↩︎
- For an account of the relationship between queer style and the threat of exposure and embarrassment, see D. A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). ↩︎