Reading Silence with Adrienne Rich

In the late 1970s, Adrienne Rich supported her friend Janice Raymond's writing of a vicious antitransgender polemic, The Transsexual Empire (1979); she never retracted that support, saying nothing publicly on trans issues. While this is well known in the trans community, no scholarly work has ever explored it. This essay turns to Rich's lifelong engagement with issues of silence and complicity in both poetry and prose to consider the meaning of her own long silence. It is guided by transgender theory, notably new work on transmisogyny and Dean Spade's call to “look more at impact than intent.” Within this framework, it explores how efforts to resist hegemony can themselves be complicit with systems of oppression. This essay not only asks what accountability for harm would look like for Rich, but, also, what hermeneutic possibilities are produced by examining her relations to gender, transgender, and her own eloquent silence.