Trans Poetics: Figuration, Embodiment and Dissent
Mar 13, 2026 — 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
As part of its Guest Lecture Series, the Department of English invites you to its latest lecture.
Trans Poetics
Contemporary trans poetry and poetics emerged against a backdrop of struggles over the relationship between trans figuration (in the sense of representation) and trans people’s lives, and amidst ongoing debates on the interrelations between experiential/identity-political, embodied and experimental writing. As such, trans poetries and poetics have frequently contended with discourses relating writing to the body, though what is meant by both “writing,” and “the body” has varied considerably in relation to differing theories of language, gender, embodiment and the social. This talk will give an overview of early debates around trans’ figuration and of subsequent trans poetic dis/articulations of bodies, identities, and figures, as well as offer some thoughts on how figurae’s enigmatic and opaque dimensions are at play and at stake in trans poetics and living.
Guest Speaker
Trish Salah
Trish Salahis the author of Wanting in Arabic, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. Her recent writing appears in the collections, Other Influences: an untold history of feminist avant-garde poetry, gendertrash from Hell, Sharp Pink Claws, and Rumi Roaming andonline at the American Academy of Poets’ Poem-A-Day, and Giorno Poetry System’s Dial-A-Poem. She edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, and is co-editor of special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and of Arc Poetry Magazine. She is associate professor of Gender Studies, and of English and Creative Writing, at Queen’s University.ic: Poems (Tsar Publications, 2002).