Defining the Need to Not Be Defined

Lyric poetry and legal discourse, as Barbara Johnson noted decades ago, grapple with the same single question: what is a person? But whereas Johnson concluded that lyric abetted legal constructions of personhood, this article argues for their meaningful divergence with respect to trans personhood. Juxtaposing government-issued identity documents with poetry by contemporary trans writers, I explore the poetic mode I call transtextuality, which emerges in response to the intensification of textual personhood in the post-9/11 era. Weaving together trans cultural studies, queer legal studies, and new lyric studies in close readings of poems as well as identity documents, this article contends that transtextuality is not just a robust rebuttal to the constraints imposed by state documentation, but is itself a public intervention in legal discourses of personhood rooted in the bureaucratic management of gender.