Transcreature

Still trying to write that essay about my experiences as a trans concert dancer. My professor told me that I wasn’t writing for my audience. The implied statement is that I’m not writing for a cis audience. I’m compromising some of my language in order to speak to this audience, but I’m trying to not compromise my story. I already notice that I do this for certain political purposes of making my writing more accessible to an audience that isn’t versed in trans theory. That’s why I utilized the word transphobia in the “Queer People Not My People” when I really meant cissexism. 

Half of this paper was trans theory, specifically Vivian Namaste’s theory of erasure from Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgender People, Kaitlyn Tikkun’s (my trans moma!) research “Embodiment beyond the binary: Sean Dorsey and the trans genderqueer presence in contemporary concert dance”, and a little bit of Jose Munoz’s Disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics. 

I think I’m taking the trans theory out of this paper because I don’t have enough room in five pages to explain review theories adequately and then employ them for my own research with is basically an auto-ethnography of my experiences in dance as a trans woman. My audience primarily will not have read these works and probably won’t bother to, except those whose my work really speaks to and are perhaps dealing with similar obstacles. 

I’m hoping that in my writing I can show that some trans theory grounds my perspective and I’m hoping that even though I’m not using the most accurate language, I can open up a dialogue that disrupts dominant ideologies of gender  and creates a more inclusive space for us to wrestle with these ideas. 

This is just me ranting to an audience that might understand where I’m coming from.