What is the difference between being and becoming? Considering concepts like Jose Munoz’s queer futurity, we can determine that transgender history and the impact of this ever-present, growing, thriving-against-all-odds community both is and is yet to be. Preciado claims that through “radical otherness” trans people have “announce[d] another order of knowledge, and the possibility of another ontology and another politics” via dis/identification with the cisgender enforcement of normative social realities. Trans storytelling is an artform which exemplifies how transness creates being through disidentifying, by exploding known boundaries and binary distinctions. Trans storytelling has worked across modes, genres, cultures, and time to reconstruct each of these categories, becoming a political and social force which rearranges the fabric of our global existence. Trans destruction, subversion, and reworking of boundaries opens up the past, present, and future to infinite possibility. 

Ideal submissions consider the impact and potential of writing and media created by transgender people, especially in relation to the theme of being and becoming. Examples of such works can include anything from fictionalized accounts and retellings of becoming such as Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi and Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks to memoir and auto-theoretical works like Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis by Grace Lavery, A Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi, and Testo Junkie by Paul Preciado. Additionally, the organizers encourage abstracts that consider contributions of film and television from trans creators such as The Matrix, I Saw The TV Glow, and Orlando: My Political Biography. While many of our example texts are of Western origin, submissions from a variety of perspectives, cultures, and nationalities are welcome. Investigations on any literature or media created by trans people which explore the ways in which transness rethinks being and becoming or reflects on boundaries and borders, are invited.

Below is a list of central questions we hope to address through this seminar:

How are transgender people de/reconstructing themselves in film and literature? What is the boundary between trans auto-theory and memoir? How do trans communities address the difference between being and becoming? How does the meaning of gender change when it is “trans”? Are fictionalized accounts of transness still “real”? How does trans storytelling reveal evidence of, as Amin puts it, “divergence as a means of managing categorical instability” in the context of formulations of ‘gender-sexuality’? Alternatively, how does Bey’s understanding of “transness” as an “unfixation [that] destabilizes destinational desires” reveal itself through trans narratives? And how can we define a “trans narrative” or “trans story”?

…And others we have yet to ask.