When Monsters Speak
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Published:June 2024
The author's 1994 essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” is a founding text of trans studies. It is addressed to Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist of Mary Shelley’s novel, and it is structured around the unnaturalness of the trans body (like that of the novel's monster). In its theorization of transgender rage, the essay demonstrates how trans politics, like queer politics, entails the recognition that certain emotions are not private, isolated experiences—that shame, fear, despair, and rage are social and political. the piece works through aesthetic questions as to what trans writing might become. The author imagines transition as an art of the body, which of necessity is also a politics of the body due to the infuriating obstacles put in the path of individual and collective self-transformation. The author creates, out of parts, a genre for this theory and practice of gender.
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