Abstract
This paper considers recent transfeminist critical creative work through an affective trope contingently named here as that belonging to the “transfeminist kill/joy,” after Sara Ahmed's framing of the “feminist killjoy.” The trope of the transfeminist kill/joy can been read as a set of proliferating dialectics expressed as the rage that comes into being through living the violent effects of transphobia and trans-misogyny and through the practice of transformational love as a struggle for existence. The texts under consideration here work both to spoil feelings of political and social well-being or pleasure that are contingent upon the tacit absence or explicit exclusion of trans women in feminist conceptual and physical spaces and to re-structure, claim, and repair feminist happiness as a reparative impulse that holds these political affects in tension as creative potential.
