English 392T - S- Reading Transgender

From newspaper chronicles of nineteenth-century gender outlaws to the present-day explosion of transgender poetry, our personal, cultural, and political understandings of gender nonconformity in the United States have long been tied to particular modes of representation. Through sustained engagement with such creative work, as well as background reading in transgender history and theory, this course will explore the literary history of trans. Although we will pull material from across time and genre, we will focus on contemporary writers like Janet Mock and Andrea Lawlor. Together, we will ask questions about authorship; the relationship between social conditions and representational strategies; the possibilities and limitations of different genres; and, ultimately, what makes literature "trans."