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