Trans poetics and trans literature

Trans poetics is a conceptual response to the changing national and international needs and contexts of trans people and trans communities. The creative writing practices that define and vizibilize trans literature resists wholly singular categorization: just as the perspectives of what defines “trans” are never identical across social, geographical, and cultural contexts, so too are the creative writing applications found in trans literatures indicative of a dynamic mix of narrative possibility. In approaching as vast and dynamic a field as creative writing (as trans literature), the chapter adopts a trans poetics perspective of transgender as a “genre” (Stone 2006 & 2014). Exploring creative writing as genre through a trans poetic lens envisages a set of integral yet differing practices and conventions, altering from community to community, but conveyed by a kind of tacit understanding between trans writer and reader. Creative writing as genre gestures toward a form/mode of creative endeavor which, to coin Trish Salah “imagines trans people as audience” (Rollmann 2015). The codes shaping and informing transgender creative writing, albeit dynamic and idiosyncratic to innumerable geographical, cultural, and socio-transnational contexts, make possible the writing of transgender literary texts―an emergent minor literature (Salah 2021)―in which the transgender writer may press against, as well as with, the customary precepts distinguishing conventional genres. This is trans poetics in action. Creative writing as trans literature from the perspective of creative practice, then, signals both an engagement in, on the one hand, making “through which trans people remix and reimagine their worlds” (Blackston 2023, 11), and, on the other, a movement towards literary discursive change―“pronominal switching” (Blackwood 2014, 88). Elements such as imitation, pastiche, word-play, irony, fragmentation, intertextuality, distorting systems of signification, introducing new pronominal systems―announce practices adopting and developing “different codes of intelligibility” (Stryker 2006, 253), to underpin a trans poetics “practice of self-inscription that is constitutively slant to the conditions of subjectivity” (Salah 2021, 178). The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature examines the intersection of transgender studies and literary studies, bringing together essays from global experts in the field.