Quinn Eades (La Trobe) presented the first ‘First Friday’ seminar on TRANSPOETICS at Deakin Downtown on 2 March 2018. Audio of Quinn’s presentation is available for download below.
Listen to Quinn Eades speak on TRANSPOETICS
TRANSPOETICS: Dialogically writing the queer and trans body in fragments
In recent years we have seen an explosion of trans memoirs, but relatively few of these have a poetic sensibility or include poetry. In this paper I will extend the concept of ‘transpoetics’, first coined by trans writer and poet T.C. Tolbert in his edited collection Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (2013), who said in a recent interview that poetry meant ‘I could do things in language and create a world for myself that I didn’t know how to inhabit with my body’. I will posit that transpoetics carries all the markers of a dialogic form, despite the fact that Bakhtin privileged the novel over poetry and poetics, claiming that poetry could only ever be monologic. I then discuss Butler’s notion of performativity alongside Jay Prosser’s interventions against using the trans body as metaphor to destabilise gender norms, and finally meditate on drag, the practice of reading, and look at transpoetics as chronotope. By placing this work alongside my own autobiographical prose poetry, this paper also performs a heteroglossic, ‘both/and’ writing of the queer and trans body.
Seminar Photos
About the Speaker
Dr Quinn Eades, La Trobe University
About the Series
Deakin University Gender and Sexuality Studies holds a public monthly seminar series on the first Friday of each month at Deakin Downtown in Melbourne’s CBD.
Find out more and register for future seminars.
Monthly postgraduate masterclasses are also open to Deakin University students.
