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Reading 6: On fairytales
it was winding, trailing, the shadows filling up the forest on a June evening, I was reading that, reading it with a falling for summer which is always long ago and far away. even in childhood it never came, it was a fairytale, something to look back on. -Beverly Dahlen, A Reading I swear it’s…
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Reading 5: On remembering and literary canons
‘I remember wondering why, since I am queer, I wouldn’t rather be a girl.’ (p. 58) ‘I remember examining my cock and balls very carefully once and finding them absolutely disgusting.‘ (p. 78) These quotations are taken from Joe Brainard’s 1975 book of prose poetry, ‘I Remember‘. I read this book during my last summer in…
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Reading 4: Idols
–I found a relic in the dawn Set idol as wallpaper. Wait. Busy in museum. Haunting the glass like I was there. In many ways that September was a weird, in-between, month. I’d just finished and handed in my Master’s dissertation on transfeminist poetics and, in so doing, had reached the end of my four…
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Reading 3: On living in a violent culture of intimidation under the anti-trans propaganda machine and terrorised by a dog-whistling red sticker in the style of the Coco-cola logo
The sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woodsTo bring the house a message- -E.B.B, Aurora Leigh I am laying on the grass in Ruskin park, South London, drinking a glass of white wine. It is early May, and the hottest day of the year so…
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Reading 2: Þrymskviða
“Freya alone I lack, methinks.” I woke up yesterday in a flash of anxiety: I should have had that letter tracked. The letter, which I had drunkenly slid into the postbox at the end of my street at 11pm the night beforehand contained a few vitally important documents, namely my only form of ID (driving…
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Reading 1: On Mix-ups
“In the mid-teenage years she said that she didn’t understand her gender, but she noted that she was following a lot of female celebrities and kind of precariously living her life through them.” I received my clinic letter from my endocrinologist as a word document on the day Liz Truss resigned as Prime Minister. Colleagues…
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Towards a trans hermeneutic
—most of it/ what i say is an afterthought I’ve been thinking a lot this past year about interpretation. Specifically, what my being trans, and my ‘discovery’ of my being trans has to do with it, and what the ‘gap’ crossed by the word ‘trans’ does for the act of interpretation. Of course ‘discovery’ is…