Perry Zurn is Visiting Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, author of
It is never easy to track “trans” in the archives—whether instituted heavily in brick-and-mortar buildings or threaded lightly through communal relations. You look at it sideways to catch—on one side or the other, this way or that, above or below—the stash that touches but exceeds it. In this chapter, I look for stashes outside the archive, for stashes that sidle up to it without being of it, and for stashed queer and trans stockpiles themselves. I also tarry over lexicons and all the ways trans folks turn the existing archive of a language against its own grain so as to build there an underhanded stash of, for, and by queer and trans life itself. Attuning to the stash in these ways means following the furtive throughout—the disruptions of belonging and the makings of new belongings.
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