Attunements to Trans Hope

In this chapter, I turn to the Five College archive of trans life as well as more canonical theories of hope to explore attunements that best equip us to notice trans hope in a poetic register. First, I cull three attunements from theorists of hope: attunements to trash, to the concrete, and to the ephemera(l). Turning to test and expand those attunements in the archive of Five College trans stories, I then offer a picture of local trans hope: trans hope is like dancing in a littered parkway, ephemeral freedom caught up in the concrete mess of the here and now. In putting the what and how of revolutionary hope in a trans key, moreover, these stories also highlight the insidious inequities that continue to mark its who.