Abstract
This article reviews Gin Müller's play Trans Gender Moves, arguing that it has translation, on several levels and in its broadest sense, at the core of its themes and aesthetics. Based on the performers’ real-life stories, Trans Gender Moves is about what it might mean to live in transition between and across genders, but also languages, cultures, and times. With a departure from their own translational experience as an audience member, the author looks at how the play connects translation to interpretation and discusses how the stage is crafted into a “translation site,” or “translocality,” where the overlapping places, times, and languages of the performers’ everyday lives are explored. It is crucial to the politics of Trans Gender Moves that all the actors, as well as the director, have themselves experienced living trans lives and that the play, by telling the life stories in the words of the people who lived them, brings trans voices into the realm of authority. Moreover, it is especially noteworthy that the performers and the audience are involved in a form of engagement that begins from multiplicity. The author suggests that the play might be used to further reflect on the challenge of how we are to escape monolingualism in transgender studies.
