Abstract
With a focus on Germany's first explicitly trans- play, Sasha Marianna Salzmann's 2016 Meteoriten (Meteorites), this article pursues the possibility of thinking about trans- and love as forces that at once ontologically transform and phenomenologically (re)orient us away from an “unchosen starting place” (Susan Stryker) and toward the possibility of joy embodied in Salzmann's figure of “the migrant of love.” Considered in a broader social and political context, this powerful tangle of trans- and love bears out against crisis politics in contemporary Germany and resonates well beyond the theater space. For theoretical grounding, the author turns to recent theories of love, in particular the work of Chela Sandoval, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Lauren Berlant, as a means of conceptualizing love as social will for political change.
