Provoking Aesthetic Enigma: Trish Salah and torrin a. greathouse on Trans Poetics

Occurring on November 7, 2024, one day after the US presidential election, this conversation sought to contextualize contemporary trans literature, particularly trans poetics, within both the present political moment and alongside its various historical manifestations, providing an intergenerational perspective on these concerns. In responding to these provocations, the conversants questioned the potential of trans cultural production to build empathy for trans subjects and the role of increased social visibility in the rise of anti-trans sentiment. Centrally, this conversation troubled the framing of the narrative problem in trans studies when applied to trans literature. The authors suggest that this problem of narrative is instead a problem of reading; they argue that to read trans literature we must contend with the aesthetic enigma of trans embodiment and read toward how these texts seek to provoke that exact aesthetic enigma.