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
Risk. To risk hope, life, and a future is the stuff of trans life. And it is also the stuff of poetry. Risk is an analytic of trans poetics insofar as it returns us again and again to what cannot always be said or known, what cannot always be seen or planned, but what lives there riotously on the edge of our horizon. As an analytic, risk pushes us to think precarity, diminished life chances, the vice grip of legal and financial instability, the threats to mental health and physical safety, and the social isolation that in many ways haunt trans lives. But as an analytic of trans poetics, risk cannot simply be thought on its face, as the determinate risk positions of trans precarity. It must also be thought as the risks that disrupt those structures and open the trans lifeworld to otherwise modes of being and belonging.
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