Stephen Burt on Troubling the Line : Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics
The Body of the Poem: On Transgender Poetry
November 17th, 2013
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-body-of-the-poem-on-transgender-poetryBEFORE WE CAN THINK about transgender bodies, transgender writers, and our (perhaps) transgender poems, we will have to think about bodies and poems in general. I'll get back to trans people, and to our poems in particular, a few paragraphs down; if that's what you're seeking, stay with me.
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These questions — of poetry and voice, of visibility and self-consciousness, of textual faces and textual substitute bodies — apply to all poems, but they have special salience when the bodies and the poet in question are trans or genderqueer. Definitions may be in order here. Trans people are people whose inner sense of gender — of whether and when we are men, women, boys or girls — does not match either our anatomical sex, or our former anatomical sex, or the way in which other people have seen us. The category includes sometime cross-dressers, performing drag kings and drag queens, people who change their everyday full-time gender — before, during, after, or without surgeries — and some people who are biologically intersex (other intersex people reject the term). "Cisgender" — a back-formation, like "acoustic guitar"—refers to people who are not trans: whose sense of their own gender matches their social role and biological sex. People who label themselves as genderqueer are trying to queer (or "trouble," or bend, or break) the binary of gender, to live as both/and or as neither/nor.
I, for example, love to be called Stephanie, though I first asked somebody to call me by that name less than two years ago. I wish I were a woman — or a girl — often, and I might be Stephanie all the time if it were easier. I'm happy enough as Stephen, most of the time, and I'm lucky to find social acceptance when I dress as a woman just now and then, and to play with the signifiers of gender, around their margins, in the rest of my life. The terms "trans" and "transgender" thus include me, while "transsexual" does not, nor does "drag queen" (which implies a stage act); "->-bleeped-<-" sounds dated (it also sounds like a rare mineral), and "cross-dresser," while accurate, has the unfortunate implication that I'm interested mostly (or fetishistically) in clothes.
