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
Although unsung by philosophy and trans studies alike, despite their attentions to the seams of relation, glue is a powerful analytic for thinking both intimacy and rupture. The Five College archive of trans life returns to the spot over and over again: this dynamic of adhesions broken and bonded, of belongings rewired beneath the (f)act of trans resistance writ large. I have collected here but a representative sample of those traces. The stories are so insistent, I am tempted to think the whole project of trans activism might boil down to the reclamation of glue. In case after case, there is a refusal of certain ways of putting things together, and a concomitant insistence that things come apart. But there is also a faith strong enough to find something in the wreckage worth connecting—in an effort to craft a more livable life and to find home.
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