First-Year Writing Seminar: Trans Poetics and Social Movement

Catalog description

In this course, we’ll examine in detail the overlaps between anti-capitalist politics, social movements for gender liberation, and poetry and poetics by trans writers. Poetics—writing that both encompasses and explicitly theorizes the opportunities and limits of poetry—is one form of cultural production that trans writers have used during the past three decades to reflect on and intervene in a series of historical and political situations. We’ll think about the possibilities opened up by this simultaneous exploration of aesthetic and political radicalism, and ask what various experiments of aesthetic movements have to do with social and political demands for people to have access to different, more liberatory, forms of living and being together. We’ll practice writing essays about poetry with precision, clarity and creativity; we’ll study the surprising and frequent alignment of trans poetry and political radicalism; and we’ll think together about whether and how poetry distinctly links people and political movement in new forms of social and political consciousness. Readings, from writers both in the U.S. and internationally, will include writing by Trish Salah, Viviane Namaste, Cam Awkward-Rich, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Amiri Baraka, Leslie Feinberg, Robert Glück, Lou Sullivan, Bryn Kelly, Nat Raha, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kamden Hilliard and Jordy Rosenberg.