About

My project seeks to examine the ways in which contemporary queer poets dismantle signification and advance abstraction within the emerging genre of ‘transpoetics’. Drawing from trans studies and twentieth-century poststructuralism, I call this the ‘trans-ing’ of poetic language, whereby signs are deployed in unorthodox ways that move across compositional, interpretive, and affective domains. With attention to poetry anthologies, critical theory, contemporary visual art, and archival materials, I argue that transing strategies enable queer poets to resist the encodement of the body and transform the personal and political meanings that structure our understanding of the world.