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
As trans folks, we are always already scattered. Our bodies do not consolidate the way they are supposed to and the way we think about ourselves and our worlds is, perhaps at its best, scatterbrained—jumping from here to there, breaking apart what appears together, taking a broom to the anthills of cisheteronormativity. Moreover, we live and function in a world where we are scattered, despite ourselves, into two genders, two social roles, two bathrooms, and two boxes. And when we can’t take the hint, we’re scattered from two to nowhere. To take scatter as an analytic of trans poetics is to look for these many scatterings in trans comings and goings. But it is also to attend to the ways we scatter transness from its own crip instabilities—the disabilities, illogics, and mad poetics at its heart.
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