I took a class last semester on geographic literary readinds and one of prescribed texts on the course was J. M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K. Coetzee is a South African writer who has won numerous awards yet one of the reviews of his 1983 novel by fellow South African author Nadine Gordimer was a scathing critique of Coetzee’s disabled gardener protagonist. Something about this ruffled my feathers because I have in the past worked as a seasonal professional garden. I have a lot of thoughts about the profession of gardening, especially considering my experience has been in members only country clubs and the private gardens of some of Dublin’s richest (non)residents. Some of these thoughts are professional. Gardening exists at the perfect intersection between labour and environmental exploitation. The hours I have spent training plants into shapes and spaces which they don’t want to occupy, cutting grass to within an inch of its life, spraying innumerable litres of glyphosate to eradicate ‘weeds’ to neatly frame the most unnatural presentation of nature. I’m sure there is something here about the fact that some of the first wage slaves were those employed by Louis XIV at the Palace of Versailles, but would be a separate essay.

My thoughts about gardening are also intensely personal. This version of my relationship with gardening is both distinct but connected to my professional one. Growing up, visiting my Irish grandparents I always recall the immaculate lines of their garden. Entering the front gates of their three quarters of an acre I was always greeted with a well edged lawn, bordered by a bed of shrubbery. In the most prominent corner of their front lawn is a well manicured rose bed populated by various different specimens, some of which have grown from slips gifted by friends and neighbours, other from my grandmothers childhood home in Sandymount. It always struck me the great deal of care with which they treat their garden, and the hours upon hours of care labour which they invest into their garden.

I didn’t grow up keeping a garden myself, so when I went for my first job I used what I learned about my grandparents relationship with their garden to secure my appointment. And it worked. I quickly took up keeping my own garden in conjunction to working. So, while I was being paid a wage for eight hours of the day to carry out this care labour on gardens which are not my own and located in places which I would otherwise not have access to, I would come home, with my knowledge, and my desire, and perform unwaged care on my own garden. There is still a financial element to this; I have an arrangement with my landlord which affords me a reduced rent because I moved in on the pretence that I would ‘keep the garden’. For her this probably means make sure the neighbours don’t complain about her tenants having a messy front garden. Another aspect to this is that in many ways, had I not started gardening I would not be living in my present house; my landlord is the mother-in-law of that previous gardener boss of mine. For me however, this relationship with the garden has offered me an opportunity that I didn’t realise I needed as a tenant and as a person.

My house has a front garden. It is small, but it’s located in a prominent position on the outside of the first bend at the top of the estate. Because it’s located on the bend it means the garden is an awkward triangular shape with the hypotenuse forming the boundary between our garden and the semi-detached next-door-neighbours. At the tip of the garden that meets the road there is a large holly bush which can become a little bit unruly if not kept cut back. Because this is on the border between the entrance to our driveway and the neighbours I’ve had a bit of back and forth between who is responsible for cutting it. This was not a verbal back and forth, instead it took the form of me doing it for the first couple of years when I moved in because I thought this was my duty as gardener. However, I took a trip at the beginning of last summer and I came hope to see that it had already been cut by my neighbour. At first I thought ‘oh no, I have failed my duty, we are a burden to the neighbours’, but after talking with him I came to realise that he merely shared a similar desire to care for our common no man’s land.

After this moment, my thinking about the garden began to change. I’m not keeping the grass cut short and the holly bush under control for my landlord, but I’m doing it for and with the neighbourhood community of which I am unquestionably a part. I might not talk to my neighbours that often, save for the few waves we share and the polite hello’s we inevitably exchange when by chance we leave the house at the same time. In the absence of vocalised words, this garden becomes a shared notice board for me and my immediate neighbour. It has also become a way for me to project to the wider neighbourhood that this house is occupied. This house is cared for. The tenants of number 6 are members of this community despite the temporal difficulties associated with renting.

All this to say that my intervention into the immediate space outside of my house reflects my subject position as gardener. Moreover, this position is a position of care, that is fundamentally community oriented. Hence why I quit the profession of gardening and am currently pursuing an English degree. I have however not given up the vocation of gardening. So perhaps it is understandable why I found Gordimer’s position particularly offensive.

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In her review of The Life and Times of Michael K, Gordimer writes:

"J. M. Coetzee, a writer with an imagination that soars like a lark and sees from up there like an eagle, chose allegory for his first few novels. It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write" (184).

Her critique of the narrative that Cotezee forms is that it consciously avoids politicisation in its cultivation of a disabled gardener protagonist who tends to "ignore history, not make it". Gordimer seems sceptical of the idea that gardening and earthly stewardship, in a word: care, expressed in the character of Michael K has the capacity to form the basis of a radical imagination of the future. To me it seems that Gordimer’s scepticism is more akin to cynicism, and that Michael K, far from ignoring history, is in fact a potent political actor.

Gordimer seems to take Michael as too simple a character to comprehend the historical context of his movements. While this may be true in the context of the war being beyond his comprehension, walking with his dying mother into a war zone, he also does maintain the capacity to learn not least, from the time he spends in the camps. K first gets picked up by authorities and brought to Jakkalsdrif labour camp after having spent a period of time in solitude on the mountains. While in Jakkalsdrif, K struggles to understand the point of such arrangements. In talking with a fellow resident from the camp for the first time he asks, “why do people stay here?” referring to the fact that “anyone could climb [the perimeter fence]. A child could climb it in a minute” (Coetzee 78). He later meets Robert, another long term resident of the camp who clarifies to K the injustice of the situation, reminding him to “remember what they pay you. You get standard wage, one rand a day … So don’t kill yourself [working]. Go and take a pee.” (81). K is aware of the contradictions but from his upbringing in the Huis Norenius institute for disabled children he has learned that he must submit to others, even if it is at the expense of his own biological survival. While this leaves him susceptible to exploitation by the hegemonic authority, this also gives him a generous quality in which he is able to engage in care labour with the mothers and the children of the camp.

Robert is a wise character who, in the narrative of the novel, represents the counter hegemonic order. As an educated person amongst those interned in the camp, he clearly seeks to influence and build solidarity amongst the camp dwellers, with his influence being clearly laid on K. Robert repeatedly reminds K of the injustices carried out in the camp, the apotheosis of which is when he outlines the provision of medical services and charity in the camp is not because they care about the wellbeing of the camps residents but “because we look too terrible when we get sick and die” (88). He goes on to confront K directly accusing him of not looking “deep enough” and that he’s been “asleep all [his] life. It’s time to wake up” (88). Indeed, K does wake up, just not in the way Robert wants him to. K stops going to work and claiming “I don't need to eat all the time. When I need to eat, I'll work” (85). K is acutely aware of the injustice he faces in the camp, expressing a kind of PTSD in his repeated recollections of Huis Norenius.

While Robert’s response to these injustices is to raise consciousness and build solidarity, K’s response takes the form of performing care. One of the days while he was not working, K brought his mattress outside to lie in the sun. As he is lying down, a group of the camp’s children “tried to rouse him, and, when he would not be roused, incorporated his body into their game” (84). For K, this experience was generative for him such that he was sorry “when the men from the council arrived to spread lime in the latrine pits and [the kids] rushed off to watch”. It can, however, also be conceived that it was generative for the children. While they ultimately rushed off to watch the men spread lime on the latrines, they are only afforded the ability to watch while, with K, they were able to actively interact with an adult. K’s focus is on breaking down internal divisions such as those between adult and youth, however he has a particular focus on gendered divisions within the camp. When one of his neighbours’ children dies, he is fixated on the mother in mourning, desiring to care but not knowing how to approach her. Then, when the police come and raid the camp, while Robert proclaims that the authorities plan to stave the camps inhabitants “loudly enough for others to hear” in an attempt to raise resistance, K helps “the woman beside him [who] had a crying baby” offering to comfort her two other children (90).

On the surface, Gordimer’s critique of Coetzee’s narrative for not believing “in the possibility of blacks establishing a new regime that will do much better” appears to hold weight (Gordimer 184). K ultimately decamps equally abandoning the authoritative structure of the camp and the capacity for resistance being built by Robert. However, Gordimer fails to see K’s care labour for the valuable form of resistance that it is. Alva Gotby points out in her book They Call it Love that care work is an essential aspect of the maintenance of life under oppressive systems. Historically, this work has been completely invisible, often taking place behind closed doors in domestic and often feminised spaces. Coetzee’s privileging of the spectacle of care labour is thus a highly political decision. Far from being cynical about both sides of oppression and resistance, K’s labour becomes fundamental to the thriving of resistance. If Robert’s efforts to build solidarity amongst the proletarianized camp dwellers are crucial to the building of a resistance movement, then K’s emotional labour is just as crucial insofar as care, what Gotby terms “emotional reproduction”, enables Robert to engage in his efforts to organise.

Although K ultimately decamps and leaves behind the relationships he built with the camp dwellers, he does not abandon his drive for care, instead turning his hand to the psycho-physical labour of caring for a garden. In contrast to Gordimer’s reading of K as merely a Gardener, Dominic Head argues in his essay ‘Gardening as resistance’ that from the ecological meaning of the novel comes the political. Here, Head points particularly to K’s time after he leaves Jakkalsdrif and returns to the Visagie’s farm and plants himself a patch of pumpkins and melons. The way in which K cares for these plants is systematic and individualised. While the first-time round he was conspicuous in using the pump to irrigate the whole patch, during his second attempt he methodically “by moonlight … dared to release the brake, pump a few inches, and carry water to his plants” one by one (Coetzee 102). K’s observance and patience recalls his activity in the camp regarding his care for children, the sentiment of which reminds the reader of the foundational nature of gardening for food.

Indeed, Head points this out in his reading of when K’s solitude is disturbed by a band of guerrilla forces from the mountains. In the novel, K has a choice to make between coming out of his hovel to make his presence known to the Guerillas and potentially join them, or remaining hidden, the latter of which he ultimately settles for:

“K knew that he would not crawl out and stand up and cross from darkness into firelight to announce himself. He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children.” (Coetzee 109).

While in Gordimer’s reading this might be seen as K refusing to pick a side, attempting to be apolitical or a radical centrist (which would ultimately end up propping up the status quo), Head successfully argues that K’s rationale for not joining the guerrillas directly in their fighting actually “implies that K affiliates himself with the guerrillas”, going on to state that “If this is ecological mysticism, it has also a political foundation with both a specific and a generalized meaning” (Head 102). Thus, K as gardener (who is fundamentally linked to K as carer), far from supporting Gordimer’s argument that the novel fails to take a political stance, becomes a highly political character whose actions unify the urgency for revolt in the novel’s presence with the necessity of a radical imagination of an alternative future.

It would be remiss not to make recourse to Girogio Agamban when discussing the inherent politicality of the character of Michael K given that on two occasions within the novel he ends up interned at some form of camp. K’s first internment has already been discussed at length above, and his second takes place only briefly during the novel’s second part narrated in epistolary form from the perspective of the camp doctor. Agamban in his book Homo Sacer builds on the Foucauldian concept of the biopolitical to do an analysis of the camp which he describes as “a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order ... thus the structure in which the state of exception - the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power - is realized normally" (Agamban 170). The camps in the novel are biopolitical localities insofar as they are the epicentre of production of worker bodies. K’s escape on both accounts thus begs to be read as biopolitical action, which becomes embroiled with his identity and activity as a gardener. During his second escape he holds on to no possessions except a paper bag of seeds which in the final section of the novel become a potent talisman for his survival. Faith in gardening is what appears to keep him alive with the doctor noting that, physiologically speaking, “the human body is not capable of [living only on pumpkin]” (Coetzee 150). Of course, it’s not just pumpkin he lives on but the faith in the biopolitical activity of gardening, faith in the reciprocity of the landscape which if cared for, will care for him. With care, life can go on.

Thus, contrary to Gordimer’s scathing review, Michale K is not simply an apolitical disabled person incapable of making a principled choice. His character may be unaware of the historical moment he occupies; however, the narrative which Coetzee builds around K is a potent political one that elevates the inert act of gardening to an action of biopolitical importance. Through K’s movements and actions both inside and outside of the camp, he expresses a strong propensity for interpersonal care which is begotten by his care for the minutiae within his garden. While Head argued K’s choice to garden in spite of the war aligns him with those fighting the oppressive forces, this essay has clearly argued that his care for the landscape is mirrored by his interpersonal care which is essential both for the continuation of resistance and the imagination of a radical alternative future. Wendy Ashmore and Bernard Knapp have pointed out that far from being a passive background, there is a “constant mutual molding of landscapes and the people who dwell in them” and that we must conceive of landscape as “actively inhabited space” (Ashmore and Knapp 8). K as gardener, as cultivator, as carer is somebody who actively inhabits his landscape and resists pacification thereby reading an alternative history and crafting an alternative future.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1997.

Ashmore, Wendy, and A. Bernard Knapp, editors. Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives. Blackwell, 1999.

Cotezee, J. M. The Life and Times of Michael K (1983). Vintage, 2004.

Gordimer, Nadine. Review of The Idea of Gardening, by J.M. Coetzee. New York Review of Books, no. February, 2 Feb. 1984, p. 184.

Gotby, Alva. They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life. Verso Books, 2023.

Head, Dominic. J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

In the author’s note to their 2019 collection of poetry Surge, Jay Bernard signs off with a potent proclamation: “I am from here, I am specific to this place, I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back”. The collection of poetry marries two independent yet deeply connected historical events, namely the 1981 New Cross Fire and the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. Both events are, in their first instance, traumatic insofar as they represent moments where life itself is brutally erased. Both events also share a commonality in their inconclusive nature. The New Cross fire was dealt with in a way that can only be described as a gross miscarriage of justice, while the inquiry into the Grenfell disaster has been stretched out, effectively denying closure to survivors, the bereaved and the community at large. In the aftermath of both events, where justice is not achieved and no conclusion is reached, they haunt both the consciousness of the immediate community and the wider popular consciousness. Surge confronts the hauntological significance of these events directly, looks at them and seeks to make peace with their oppression. Bernard gives space on the page to dead bodies of the past, living bodies of the past, and ultimately their own body of the present, extending a care for the self and a care for the other. This act of ‘haunting back’ ultimately enables a form of recovery from ongoing trauma.

I want to start by outlining some terms which will form the basis of the following analysis:

1: Recovery. The sense of recovery that this essay is referring to is primarily related to the fact that the traumas of New Cross and Grenfell are events that somehow alter the popular psyche thereby necessitating a form of recovery. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the appropriate definition for recovery would be “The regaining or restoration of one's health or a mental state” (OED, Recovery, N., Sense I.i.4.b.”). Although, when looked up, the first definition of recovery presented by the Oxford English dictionary is a legal one concerning “The fact or process of gaining or regaining possession of or a right to property, compensation, etc., by a legal process or judgment” (OED, Recovery, N., Sense I.i.2.a). In a sense, Jay Bernard pursues both of these ends; they recover material from the archive that is presented to the reader upon which we are asked to cast judgement, thus allowing for the recovery of the right to agency and space within the narratives of these two tragedies. In retaking ownership of that agency and space, they also nurse the reader through the trauma, offering space, and enacting care within that space.

2: Care. Care is a requirement for recovery. There are multiple competing and conflicting definitions of care ranging from interpersonal to institutional. For the purposes of this essay, I want to focus on a specific form of trans care that Bernard, as a trans poet, is in a unique position to enact. In the introduction to the recently published Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature, Sabina Sharp stresses that “trans literature is entangled with experiences of transition and queer communities of care” (Sharp 7). Hil Malatino expands on this concept of trans care in their book of the same title, describing non-hierarchal “care webs” that develop within trans communities from the experiences of “upheaval and emergence into a social world with shifting and shifted parameters” (Malatino 13). As a work of trans literature, Surge is entangled with this process of care, enacting simultaneously self-care and community care by putting Bernard’s body in conversation with the body of the archive.

3: Space. Care requires space. Like care, space is a broad concept. As a framework for understanding both the spaces within Bernard’s poems and the literal and symbolic space that their poems occupy, I will draw heavily on Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space, particularly his ‘spatial architectonics’. For Lefebvre, space is produced both physically and socially by “the body, with its capacity for action and its various energies” (Lefebvre 170). Contrary to the neoliberal framework, the energies tend not to be used efficiently or economically. Instead, Lefebvre claims that they beg to be “wasted; and the explosive waste of energy is indistinguishable from its productive use: beginning on the plane of animal life, play, struggle, war, and sex are coexistive. Production, destruction and reproduction overlap and intersect" (177, italics original). This is of particular interest to Bernard’s poetry, which overlays the explosive upheaval following the New Cross Fire onto their own sexual awakening.

4: Haunting. This brings us back to the start, with Bernard’s principle intention of haunting the archive back. Bernard has clarified in interviews that, for them, haunting holds two meanings. First there is the sense of playing the role of an observer of the past. In this fragmented version of the past, they get to explore the lives of the subjects of the New Cross tragedy by “inhabiting their realm, not the other way around” (Marks np). In the second sense, the meaning they draw on is from Gail Lewis’ idea that “haunting is the future” (Marks np). This second instance also invokes Avery Gordon’s definition of haunting which she classifies as “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known” (Gordon xvi). As such, Bernard’s poetry looks directly at the ghostly matters of the past, seeking to illuminate their contradictions and, in some way, resolve them. Bernard also claims that “the archive is a body and it does connect us back to the past” (Marks np). The embodiment of the archive, in space, allows Bernard to enact care, thereby enabling recovery.

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Following these general comments and within this conceptual framework then, what hauntological acts of recovery does Bernard carry out and enable in their poetry? The sequence opens with a poem titled ‘Arrival’ guided by the first word “Remember” (Bernard 1). The poem takes the form of terms of reference – “that we might be named … / That we were made visible … / That they gave us their first and last names …” similar to that outlined in 2017 following the establishment of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. Unlike the inquiry however, these terms of reference are incomplete. Bernard leaves space on the page for the individual reader to add their own terms to remember; the structure of the poem quickly moves from full lines to fragments, closing with the lines “never to be full – / snap, crackle / amen”. In effect, upon “arrival”, this invites the reader to bring their own grief to the situation, establishing the archive as a therapeutic space in which pain can be explored safely and creatively.

‘Arrival’ is immediately followed by the poem ‘Ark’ which explores the difficulty of interpreting and classifying the memory fragments that materialise in the archive. Bernard writes “I take this morning from its box, see how the years have warped / its edges, its middle pages conjoined at the text” (Bernard 2). That “this morning”, a unit of time, can manifest as a fixed object is significant for the reading of space within the text. In Lefebvre’s ‘Spatial Architectonics’ he writes that “time is distinguishable, but not separable from space” (Lefebvre 175). In a hauntological sense, time can be felt to repeat uncontrollably. Mark Fisher classifies the hauntological experience as “the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat,’ a structure that repeats, a fatal pattern” – the specters of social violence manifest seemingly uncontrollably (Fisher 19). Bernard allows for those moments in time to be constructed as objects that can be controlled, stored (spatially) in boxes until we are ready to, as it were, interrogate them and classify them. In the final line, the speaker of the poem declares “I file it under fire, corpus, body, house” (Bernard 3). The simultaneous classification of this moment of time as spatial and embodied gives weight to Lefebvre’s claim that space (“house”) is produced by the social subject (“corpus, body”) with all its chaotic energy (“fire”). This space, at the very least, allows the subject reader to make sense of the ensuing explosion of energy that was the Brixon Riots and various accompanying acts of resistance.

While there is space within the poems as descriptions, there is also the physical space which they take up in the hand of the reader. The printed book has 58 numbered pages and an additional four blank leaves that follow the acknowledgments. Although likely a simple fact of printing that these pages are left blank, they nevertheless beg to be read as part of the poetic/therapeutic space which Bernard produces. Within the body of the work, three pages are given over to directly reproducing works from the archive. The first appears on page 10, as a picture of a handwritten placard inscribed with the words “The POLICE / The PRESS / The SILENCE”, positioned in front of the burnt-out window of 439 New Cross Road is placed next to the poem “Clearing”. The poem demands to be read in conjunction with the photo which becomes even more potent given the fact that it is written in the imagined lyric voice of one of the victims. The speaker begins “He takes my head and places it in a plastic bag”, describing the unceremonious clearing of the scene carried out by police officers (Bernard 11). The police in the scene maintain a silence that holds within it a prejudicial tension as suggested by the adjacent photo. Bernard, however, presents an alternative version of silence that is in fact generative, constituting a form of care. Despite being present elsewhere in the collection, Bernard’s own voice is absent from this scene. Instead, they choose to make space for the direct and indirect reproductions of these moments of loss. In her book They Call it Love, Alva Gotby posits that the labour of care is an essential aspect of survival under oppressive systems. Historically, this labour, which she refers to as “emotional reproduction”, takes place outside of the sphere of appearance (the domestic sphere) and is thus socially invisible (Gotby 2). Bernard thus invokes this form of care by sidelining their own voice and, as it were, reproducing the emotion associated with this specific spatio-temporal moment. In so doing, they allow the reader to confront the discomfort of that moment, to share and express solidarity in that grief.

Although, Bernard also negates this traditionally gendered version of care by returning back to their own lyric voice in the poems ‘Peg’ and ‘Pride’, which feature adjacent to one another towards the end of the sequence. Peg opens with “Tonight we are boys together. Now I understand / why for brothers postcodes rule.” (Bernard 42). The poem then proceeds to follow these two “boys together” on a journey across the city. Unfolding like a map of familiar spaces across the city, the reader is transported “down Coldharbour Lane” passing “the behemoth of Somerleyton” and the “houses that have been empty since the eighties”. This is a picture of a neoliberal, austerity laden city in which queer life thrives as an act of resistance against these unresolved social antagonisms. This is the same city which allowed the violent destruction of human lives in New Cross in 1981, and the atrocity of Grenfell in 2017. The following poem ‘Pride’ ends with the line “They call this a city, I call it the dark between two bodies” (43). ‘Pride’ is charged with the tentative erotic of “urgent tongue searching for a place / to pass the root in that way, to go knuckle deep in another, / in a third way sucking white sap directly”. Yi-fu Tuan asserts that “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other” (Tuan 3). The tongue searching for place amid the vast, unmeasurable expanse of space within the city is an explicit longing for the security of home. These spaces, those that fulfil the primordial need for shelter and that offer opportunities for love and for care, are the same spaces that have become insecure, and haunted by social violence in the light of Grenfell and New Cross. Bernard’s personal lyric intervention into the sequence thus connects these intersecting oppressions and offers a queer and radical alternative that achieves security through action and through community.

In their poetry manifesto, Bernard summarises their relationship with space and queerness:

“Standing below the tower, I realised the intensity of this statement. Queerness between the streets. Queerness not as relationship history or desire but as a stranger in the archives. Queerness as arc of history. Queerness informed by this tragi-carnival, this cycle of history. The work I have been doing on the New Cross Fire is the truest expression of queerness I have felt for some time: all-encompassing, outward-looking, rooted.” (Bernard, “Manifesto: ‘Stranger in the Archives.’”)

I think this summarises the points I have raised above quite aptly, encompassing the four terms that frame this essay. There is care in Bernard’s expression of queerness. Their work is outward-looking, aware of both the historic and contemporary other, and generously gives space to both on the page. It is also intensely introspective, deeply rooted in both the bio-body and the hauntological body politic that materialises in the archive. As such, it is careful in the sense that it both cares for and cares with, forming part of a care web in which the reader becomes ensnared and begins to form an equally integral part. This care enacts recovery; it recovers ownership of stories that must not be forgotten. Crucially, it enables us to move past the disabling effects of collective social trauma, and collectively pursue the imminent something-to-be-done.

Works Cited

Bernard, Jay. “Manifesto: ‘Stranger in the Archives.’” Poetrysociety.org.uk, https://poetrysociety.org.uk/manifesto-jay-bernard-stranger-in-the-archives/. Accessed 19 Dec. 2024.

Bernard, Jay. Surge. Chatto & Windus, 2019.

Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, 2012, pp. 16–24, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Gotby, Alva. They Call It Love. Verso Books, 2023.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991.

Malatino, Hil. Trans Care. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Marks, Heather. “Interview with Jay Bernard — Surge, the New Cross Fire and the Archive as Body.” Medium, 2 July 2019, https://medium.com/@hlmmarks1/interview-with-jay-bernard-surge-the-new-cross-fire-and-the-archive-as-body-d1021d41f801.

“Recovery, N., Sense I.i.2.a.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9788584945.

“Recovery, N., Sense I.i.4.b.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4265932276.

Sharp, Sabine. “Introduction.” The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Sabine Sharp, Routledge, 2024, pp. 1–18.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Hello, friend. Forgive me for losing track of the schedule of uploading regularly on the first Sunday of every month. This project for me is part of a larger project of figuring out life and living amid the suffering and sadness that exists as a result of plight of capitalism. I’ve learned a lot from doing this over the last 8 months, especially about what I like to write and how I want to write, and I’m thankful to the few who have been reading (really, I appreciate you). My goal is still to produce twelve essays for this, and I have another couple in the works that I’m going to try and complete before university hits full swing in September. For now, please enjoy this account of a trip I made back in June.  

In the preface to my last edition to this substack I talked about the experience I was in the middle of. Situated in an Airbnb in Madrid, I was there as a duty to my friend who had travelled to access gender affirming healthcare. We have since returned from Spain and now, approaching 10 weeks post operation, I’m really glad to say the progression of his recovery has been immense. (Love you lots, dear friend). (Thank you for the affording me the opportunity to witness this journey of yours).

Three days after returning from Spain, I once again transported myself to the airport taking first a train, then a bus, so that I could ultimately sit on an aluminium tube for seven and a half hours travelling west, magically landing in the heart of the American Empire only two hours (clock time) after leaving Dublin. My trip to the United States was comprised of a series of interesting experiences, some of which were intentional, and others which happened by pure chance. What I’m going to discuss here is one of the intended destinations that I ended up at which pertains to a subject I have already broached on this substack.

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Back in April, I shared an essay here which I wrote for my one of my English classes (Literatures of Place), in which I discussed a collection of poetry by Murial Rukeyser called The Book of the Dead. Originally published as a long sequence in Rukeyser’s collection US 1 the sequence known as The Book of the Dead seems to have existed in relative obscurity. In 2016, Catherine Venable Moore published an essay of the same name in the Oxford American in which she sought to expand “the document of disaster” by following the literary map drawn by Rukeyser in 1932 in the 21^st century. Moore’s essay has since been republished in 2018 alongside Rukeyser’s poetry and photographs of the site by Nancy Naumburg, who visited West Virginia with Rukeyser in 1931. The photos were originally supposed to be published alongside the poetry but, for reasons long since forgotten, they never were.

I had already been planning to take a trip to the US to visit my cousin who I had recently reconnected with, when my lecturer (also named Catherine) introduced me to the text in class. So, I floated the idea to my cousin about taking a road trip to West Virginia to do exactly what Catherine Venable Moore had done in 2016. I had been to West Virgina once before as a child. My mother grew up just outside Washington DC so as children we used to spend a few weeks of the summer visiting my mom’s parents. One year, for reasons I cannot recall because I was probably only 10, my parents rented an old hunting cabin in the middle of George Washington National Forest, on the border of Virginia and West Virginia. I recall bits about railroads and coal mining and that’s about it. In subsequent chance encounters with information about West Virgina I’ve learned that it’s one of the poorest states in the United States, It’s geography (Appalachia; some of the oldest geological formations in the world; the same mountains as the northern part of Ireland as well as the Scottish Highlands) has historically made access difficult, hence the railroads, and it has been the epicentre of labour struggle and environmental exploitation in the United States (See: Pick me up I’m scared episode 105: Further Right than West Virgina ; DuPont Chemical poisoning the Kanawha River). When I explained all of this to my cousin as the reason why I wanted to visit the very specific and otherwise insignificant town of Gauley Bridge, perhaps they were interested, perhaps they were filled with the same ludic desire to go places without any plans to create the capacity for synchronous meaning to occur. Either way, they agreed.

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The drive to West Virginia to me felt monumental, though I was informed by my companion that such a journey borders on routine for a lot of folks in the US (I now understand the meaning of ‘the Great American Road Journey’). I don’t think I failed to consider the sheer size of the landmass I was on, I think I failed to comprehend what that size meant. I suppose the journey was relatively benign – a highway is a highway; regardless of where you’re heading, you’ll pass truck stops, rest stops, petrol stations and so forth. As I sat in the passenger seat, I began to guess the names of which fast food chain would show up on the next variant of the same sign that appears every couple of miles. These special signs remind drivers to interrupt their journey from a to b and to stop at a place that is not quite a, not quite b, but that appears as enough of a destination for the driver to spend 25 minutes or so opening their wallets in road-oriented business, so that workers can get paid minimum wage, so that maybe life can continue here, maybe. We sped past most of these pseudo places on to our real destination deep in the mountains of West Virginia.

The further west we got, the more intense the peaks and valleys of the Appalachians became. For 3 minutes we would steadily climb the side of a hill, just to pass an unceremonious sign stating that, for one brief moment, the machine to which we are attached existed at the highest point in (name) county. Then we descend just to do it all over again. We passed ‘run-away truck ramps’, elements of road architecture I didn’t realise were necessary until I witnessed both the intensity of the terrain and the intensity of the machines that must traverse it for one reason or another (must they?). We passed a bear, or more accurately, a bear crossed our path of travel, suddenly and clumsily as it attempted to ‘cross the road’. Wildlife interrupts the narrative of road travel. Or, more accurately, road travel interrupts ecosystems.

We arrived ultimately at our destination; a campsite called Grandview sandbar on the banks of the New River. On the day of arrival, a Parks Services worker arrived to register new campers and, while they were with us, offered several leaflets about the New River.

We learn: “NEW RIVER IS NOT NEW. It is one of the oldest rivers in the world, older than the Appalachian Mountains themselves. Here at the gorge, the river cuts through the Appalachian Plateau. Some exposed rocks are as old as 330 million years.”

We learn: “In 2020, New River Gorge National River became New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. This change further protects the spectacular features and traditional recreational opportunities of this natural and recreational treasure”.

We learn: “Gauley River National Recreation Area, established in 1988, includes 25 miles of Gauley River and 5 miles of Meadow River. Expert Boaters rank Gauley among the best whitewater rivers in the world. Dropping more than 668 feet through rugged terrain, the river’s complex stretch of whitewater has over 100 rapids with a steep gradient, technical runs, a high volume of water, and huge waves. Gauley offers whitewater boating, fishing, hunting, camping, and picnicking. Next to the recreation area is the Summersville Dam, which regulates the flow of the Gauley River and causes its outstanding fall whitewater season.”

We do not learn that Gauley Bridge was the epicentre of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in the history of the United States. We do not learn that West Virginia has been the victim of extractivism for much of its settled history. We do not learn that dam building = ecosystem destruction; that the masses of concrete that “regulate the flow” of the New River, the Gauley River, the Bluestone River are not 330 million years old; that the forces that create areas of blissful recreation rely on labour exploitation and industrialised murder. Selective preservation in this here dam-nation.

The oppressive and muggy West Virginia summer brings me to, on the advice of the Parks Services worker, bathe in the glorious force of nature that is the (not so) New River. The water is remarkably cool and refreshing in spite of the 30+ degree heat. Although, whenever wild swimming I become acutely aware of the concept of pollution. Ever since a noxious algal bloom covered Lough Neagh last year (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/22/pollution-plan-must-cut-intensive-farming-for-lough-neagh-to-survive?CMP=share_btn_url) I find myself sceptical of the ‘purity’ of ‘nature’. Water may look crystal clear, an oasis in the middle of high summer, but climate change is not a crisis of aesthetics. It’s a hyperobject,the comprehension of which is far beyond the scope and ability of a mere mortal eye. I wade in to my chest. I think about oil and tar, years of coal mining that took place in the new river gorge which is the ultimate reason why railway tracks line its banks for most of its length. The mines may have since ceased operation, but what is left over? What dark entropic forces have fossil fuel extraction unlocked? What actually is preserved?

Snippets about the coal mining that took place in this valley are presented to us spontaneously. A solitary and isolated sign at the bottom of the dirt road leading to our camp site (who is this sign for?) seeks to preserve. We learn that there used to be a large town here. That there was a miners’ hospital here even though (probably because) the town wasn’t a mining town. We learn that the towns principle exploit was logging, and that by 1940, the town was in decline because loggers had stripped the hills naked and consequently needed to move on to find more land to assault. Standing there is confusing – the sign is positioned under a tree. We had just walked along a tree-lined, tree-covered dirt road through a tree-environment. Ther were trees here. Then there weren’t. And now there are again. Is the landscape recovered? Does the landscape remember? Are they still trying to overcome their trauma?

On the third day of our short stay, we made the pilgrimage to Gauley Bridge. We leave the campsite and head along 41 and then join 61, ultimately joining highway 19 at Oak Hill, passing Fayetteville and crossing the New River Gorge Bridge. We stop at the overlook to admire this piece of Road Infrastructure. Signage tells us that this is the 3^rd highest bridge in America, that it is the longest steel arch bridge in the western hemisphere, that it was completed in 1977. I admit it was crazy to experience, though its function is obfuscated by the visitor centre and overlook that transforms the road itself, the path from a to b into a destination.

From the bridge-place we proceed to the Hawks Nest State Park Overlook, just outside Anstead. We pull in at the Hawks Nest lodge, a hotel and recreation facility completed in 1967 which marks the overlook at the east end of the reservoir, looking west towards the dam and the opening of the tunnel. It was at this point we laid eyes for the first time on the thing that took so many lives, that changed a landscape, inflicted geographic trauma (social, physical). We stood on the exposed rock face behind a rotting fence, observing the body of water (it’s calm, still. Where’s the power?  Where’s the violence?). At our feet we noticed initials inscribed in the stone. CGW, HGW, LRH 1932. M Sutton Jr. 1929. HL – GD ’30. I’m still not sure what these meant, if there was any connection to the incident. Workers or owners. Whatever they were read to me like Latin inscriptions in the crypt of a church; I wasn’t sure what I was reading but I knew I was bearing witness to the fruits of the dead.

From the overlook we proceeded down the valley to the town of Gauley Bridge. Three miles west of the Hawks Nest Dam, near where the tunnel emerges at the other end, the town itself was bypassed many years ago so it’s easy to ignore. In fact, the bypass makes it difficult to stop in the town. We drove in, up through main street and then quickly out of the town by accident on the road towards Brownsville. On returning to the town, we pulled in to have a look around. Not much has changed I suppose since the 1930’s and certainly since Moore’s visit in 2016. Buildings crumble and decay. Petrol stations stay healthy as they always do – cars need snuff. At the top of main street, I found the New River Lodge. In 2016, Moore reported that the hotel was open, but that most of its residence were “long-term tenants, elderly or on housing assistance”. When I approached, the front door was locked, and the car park was empty, which I assume meant closed, probably for good. I asked in the petrol station about the New River Lodge, and Pastor Charles Blankenship, grandson of Mearle Blankenship who Moore reported was the proprietor of the New River Lodge in 2016. I was told by the attendant that the lodge was shut, and that he was unaware of anybody by the name of Blankenship. We left, sorrowful. We had remembered. We have forgotten.

In the petrol station, I bought a copy of the Charlston Gazette-Mail, mainly for my own posterity. In it, I was surprised to find an opinion piece on coal mining. “Does coal really keep the lights on?”     the article’s title asks.

I learn that “The grid in the state most reliant on coal-fired power is one of the worst for power outages in the nation”.

I learn that “coal is now the most expensive form of generating electricity, and 91% of customers in West Virginia get their power from coal-fired plants. So, West Virginians pay some of the highest utility bills in the country”.

I learn that “Coal, despite its continuing decline in nationwide energy production, dwindling employment numbers in the region, the depletion of seams to mine and its contribution to climate change still has a death grip on West Virginia’s policy makers, many of whom have a vested financial interest in the industries continuation”.

Reading this article I’m reminded of ‘The Doctors’ who, corrupt and in control, attempt to gaslight. Anything to prevent the transfer of wealth from rich to poor:

“Dr. Goldwater: first are the factors involving the individual. Under heading B, external causes. Some of the factors which I have in mind – Those are the facts upon the blackboard, the influencing and controlling factors.

Mr. Marcantonio: those factors would bring about acute silicosis?

Dr. Goldwater: I hope you are not provoked when I say “might.” Medicine has no hundred percent. We speak of possibilities, have opinions.
Mr. Griswold: Doctors testify answering “yes” and “no.” Don’t they?
Dr. Goldwater: Not by the choice of the doctor.
Mr. Griswold: But that is usual, isn’t it?
Dr. Goldwater: The do not like to do that. A man with a scientific point of view – unfortunately there are doctors without that – I do not mean to say that doctors are angels – but most doctors avoid dogmatic statements, avoid assiduously “always,” “never.”
Mr. Griswold: Best doctor I ever knew said “no” and “yes.”
Dr. Goldwater: There are different opinions on that, too. We were talking about acute silicosis.

The man in the white coat is the man on the hill,

The man with the clean hands is the man with the drill,

The man who answers “yes” lies still.

-      Did you make an examination of those sets of lungs?

-      I did

-      I with you would tell the jusy whether or not those lungs were silicotic

-      We object.

-      Objection overruled.

-      They were.”

from: Murial Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead, ‘The Doctors’

Like the present policy makers of West Virginia under the yoke of industrial mining companies desperately hanging on to their profit-making enterprises who enforce a regime of blissful ignorance, The Doctors do the bidding for Union Carbide, exercising the power of avoidance, the power of ignorance up to the final moment. Ignorance opposes healing.

This is not a matter of remembering one catastrophe. This is about how we deal with trauma. The palimpsest of trauma inflicted on a landscape over the course of two centuries of industrial extraction. The palimpsest of trauma inflicted on a people. Avoidance is how we cope. The industrial plants owned by Union Carbide still operate. Since 2001, they opperate under the proprietorship of Dow Chemical, the bastion of pharmacopower who, during the Vietnam War, was the sole supplier of napalm to the United States’ military. Killing is their business. Ignorance is how we survive. But that lets them win. And that lets us die. How do we move beyond survival into the land of the living – the land of the winning?

This is evidently not an essay about the beauty of a landscape, serene, ancient. That would be ignorant. Nor is it an essay about the importance of poverty tourism - I dont recommend that either. The landscape was beautiful, I am always overcome by the forces of nature that exist, trying to comprehend the geological temporality in which they operate and in whcih my existence is only momentary. This landscape has been altered both slowly (geological) and very quickly (human, industrial, extraction). It is beautiful. It is not wholly natural.

I’m still trying to make sense of what drew me here in the first place. Moore is from Fayetteville; for her this is a place with which she can be intimately acquainted, to which she belongs. I’m an outsider looking in, yet I feel intensely connected. Maybe it's the solidarity bewteen the forces of extraction from which my own dear island has suffered (9000 years of deforestation) (scars we call bogs) and those of WV. As a member of the dispossessed (housing security), I feel solidarity with the workers who were involved building the dam and tunnel (houses burnt down). I feel solidarity with the present-day workers and livers and lovers of WV, 17.5% of whom live below the federal poverty line. Like WV, tourism continues to extract from the landscape to whom the inhabitants of Ireland belong, as the forces of capital reign supreme. I Suppose my visit was a way of dealing with trauma (persona, political). Bearing witness, remembering pain that is not ours contextualises pain that we call home. The sadness is universal. Can we afford to remember?  Can we afford to forget?  

Hello! I am prefacing this essay with an apology for having missed an upload last month. The month of May was a month of examinations which usurped a lot of my time. Exam preparations probably should have taken up even more of my time, but I instead gave time over to being whimsical with friends who were set to travel back to their counties and countries of origin, or to begin working to afford education, rent and general subsistence under our present economic conditions. I also had to spend time preparing for my present occupation; on the 28^th of May myself and a dear friend of mine travelled to Madrid, Spain so that he could undergo gender affirming masculinization mammoplasty, consisting of a bilateral mastectomy, a procedure which is popularly referred to as Top Surgery. The procedure, naturally, inflicts a considerable amount of pain and trauma onto the body which will be permanently memorialised on the fabric of the body through the existence of a semi-symmetrical pair of scars, two thirds the way up the torso. These scars represent pain and trauma, but they also represent recovery, and they represent the ways in which technoscientific advancements have completely shifted the ways in which trans people can achieve embodiment.

I am in Madrid acting as a carer, a position which I have been thinking a lot about, especially in terms of what I have been writing about on this substack. Recovery requires care. There are certain aspects of recovery that require that cannot be achieved, or at least would be considerably more difficult without the care of another - and by recovery here I am referring to the general idea of recovery which encompasses the multiplicity of definitions the word holds: recovery from grief, trauma, addiction, loss etc. In this specific case I’m here to assist with movements, cooking, cleaning, and generally ensuring the comfort of my friend.

There are also certain conditions which must be fulfilled to ensure healthy recovery. Access to a secure space is perhaps most important, especially in this case. We are fortunate enough to have access to a space; University education and a well(ish) paying job has allowed my friend to save enough to rent an Airbnb for the best part of 3 weeks which comfortably and securely affords him the capacity to rest and me the capacity to prepare meals and tend to his various needs.

There are multiple recoveries taking place here. There is the recovery from surgery, which I am able to assist with because I’m fortunate enough not to have to work and to have the time to devote to my friend. There is also the general recovery from gendered socialisation, of which surgery can be a vital constituent part. There is also my personal complex recovery that I’m not sure has a specific epicentre but that I am sure is definitely taking place.

While we are here recovering however, I can’t help but feel conflicted about our ability to recover; is this experience coming at the expense of another? We are staying in an Airbnb. Every part of my body hurts to think that I am an active participant in an economy which I decry and actively resist at home and yet complicitly engage in while I’m a guest in another land. I feel like an active participant in gentrification; my romantic sipping of coffees on the balcony basking in the sun and lapping up the sounds of a city takes place simultaneously to the inflation of rent, the robbery of the supply of homes, the eviction of workers to the suburbs or beyond.

Yet I cannot imagine how else this could be done. The regime of transphobia that exists in our homeland  has made it necessary to travel abroad in order to access gender affirming healthcare. This same regime that so desperately wants to support landlords extorting their tenants at home also wants to export that ideological project by forcing us not only to travel for healthcare but to transfer a considerable amount of our non-existent individual wealth to a foreign landlord.

There seems to be a local campaign in the neighbourhood of the apartment that we are staying in to oppose the profit lead redevelopment of a 1990’s art deco shopping centre into a high-rise development of a couple thousand luxury flats. I want to express solidarity with this campaign because it is ethe exact struggle that we engage in with in CATU back at home. But solidarity must be more than words on paper. Solidarity is a material act of giving away a part of your individual self to a collective cause, thereby generating a community that has a capacity to develop collective wealth. I don’t feel able to do that while we are here, if only for a brief period, given that we are reinforcing the exact economic force that wants to redevelop the shopping centre into a high-rice development of a couple thousand luxury flats.

Sure, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism (although thinking about healthcare as something that we must consume is a very interesting concept). And while I don’t think there is anything material I can do in the next couple weeks, I think developing a consciousness of our position within that system is the most valuable contribution I can offer. Thinking in terms of recovery: while we are here for the purpose of both specific and general recovery, there is another condition which I think we (general) need to recover from, that being financial socialisation under capitalism. Recovery is learning to allow oneself to dream, to begin to imagine that there is a future that is alternative to the intolerable present. This is something I want to explore more in future essays, especially for how the ability to recover interacts with the negative stimuli that traumatise us in varied and complex ways.

The essay I’m going to present today is somewhat adjacent to these ideas. This essay was one I produced for a class last semester on trans literature. The exact question was to consider the significance of freedom and confinement comparatively in Akawkae Emezi’s 2018 novel Freshwater and Virgina Woolf’s Orlando. I hold that this is adjacent to the process of recovery because it explores the intersecting privileges and oppressions that can either enable or disable the process of recovery, or indeed can themselves be the epicentres of trauma from which subjects must recover. Please enjoy the following <3.

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In her 2017 essay “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?”, Jessica Berman begins to explore the links between gender transformation and transnational movements in Virgina Woolf’s Orlando. Berman’s thesis is that there is an inexorable link between gendered and national identities insofar as the transgression of gendered binaries has the capacity to destabilise the underpinnings of rigid national boundaries. Despite being published almost a century after Orlando, Akaweke Emezi’s 2018 novel Freshwater manages to occupy a similar space as both a transgender and transnational narrative. Both texts reveal something about the specific freedoms and confinements that are afforded and imposed on trans bodies and, crucially, both texts identify the liminal space created by national boarders to be the origin of the dialectic between trans freedom and trans confinement. There are of course differences between the two with racial and class dynamics heavily influencing the narrative resolution of both texts. In addressing these tensions, the following essay will discuss freedom and confinement in Freshwater and Orlando, examining particularly the concepts of transition, transnationality and ownership, the freedoms they generate, and restrictions they impose.

Transnational migration is central to the narrative structure in both Orlando and Freshwater, with a movement across international borders forming the epicentre of freedom and confinement in both texts. For Orlando, this movement is much more of an adventure as a product of free will, whereas for Ada the move is a product of economic necessity. Orlando is a comfortable member of the landed gentry, possessing a sizable estate. When Orlando runs into minor difficulty with their house towards the end of the second chapter, the narrator outlines that “he did what any other young man would have done in his place, and asked King Charles to send him as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople” (Woolf 74.) Although a major change in Orlando’s life, the way in which it is communicated as a minor point in the middle of a small paragraph suggests that, for Orlando, this journey is only minor. The suggestion that this is the normal thing that any other young man would do, coupled with the fact that Orlando seems to have direct access to the king, outlines the freedom and privilege that Orland’s class background affords them access to.

In contrast, Ada’s journey is far more restrictive. Having grown up in Nigeria, at 16 Ada moves from her homeland in Nigeria across the Atlantic to attend university in a “small town in the Appalachian Mountains” in north America (Emezi 39). Unlike Orlando, Ada’s migration is not a product of her own free will, rather it’s clarified that Saachi, Ada’s mother, made the decision to move her there for university. Ada’s transatlantic crossing resonates heavily with the history of the middle passage which saw the violent dislocation of African people to north America as chattel slaves.  Omis’eke Natasha Tinsley has argued that the history of the Black Atlantic has always been queer as it engenders a “praxis of resistance” insofar as the occupants of slave ships forged connections “in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to”, continuing to live in spite of imperial hegemony (Tinsley 199). While Ada wasn’t being transported as a chattel slave, her journey is still presented as a material (economic) necessity, presumably being sent to the United States by her mother to chase the freedom associated with better education. Like Orlando, Ada’s body which is a trans body is being transported in a pre-transition state, however unlike Orlando, Ada’s body falls under a racialised category and the comparative confinement she faced reflects that. Upon arrival that the mountain university town, it became clear that “Ada didn’t quite fit”, being somewhat alienated on the honours floor amongst the “white equestrian folk” and being considered strange by other Black students for listening to Linkin Park (Emezi 50). The contrasting depictions of migration in the two novels reveals the different levels of freedom afforded to racialised bodies compared to non-racialised bodies when traversing borderlands; as a white man of high social standing Orlando is relatively free to travel how they like, whereas Ada as a black migrant child is relatively confined.

Orlando’s sudden and violent transition introduces a conflict to Orlando’s transnational narrative. Although at the start they traverse national boundaries with relative ease, with their transition from male to female, the legitimacy of their nationhood is called into question. The episode takes place immediately after “terrible and bloody insurrection” where the “Turks rose against the Sultan” and attempted to murder “every foreigner they could find” (Woolf 85). The British embassy where Orlando had been resident was, unsurprisingly, ransacked and looted by the Turkish revolutionaries as an enclave of a foreign nation. Before the revolution Orlando inexplicably fell into a seven-day slumber, waking only after the event of the insurrection, to the sound of trumpets and the revelation that they had spontaneously transitioned from man to woman. For Berman, Orlando’s sex change in turkey represents a “challenge to the embodiment of nationality and empire”; in parallel with Orlando’s personal privilege is undermined by their transition from the male (freedom/privilege) to female (confinement/subordination), the influence of the British empire Constantinople is undermined through the destruction of the embassy (Berman 221).

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Although not quite as sudden, Ada’s journey through gender transition similarly calls ideas of nationhood into question. Ada’s transition is an ongoing process in Freshwater, each change she undergoes causes distress for the ogbanji spirits that occupy her body. Before puberty, Ada’s body occupied the liminal space of androgyny, with the freedom to “move between boy and girl” (Emezi 123). With that freedom came the restriction of spaces that Ada could occupy without question. On the same page the narrator notes that, when attending the local sports club, “Adults would stop [Ada] in the women’s changing room”, revealing Jack Halberstams point that “bathrooms beyond the home take on the proportions of a gender factory” (Halberstam 24). Despite her subjective embodiment, her objective existence poses a threat to the social fabric of her nation and is consequently policed, thereby restricting her freedom. The policing of Ada’s gender takes on a physical form during her transition through puberty as hormones kick in and her body begins to change shape. This transition can be read in a similar way to Orlandos spontaneous transition as it happens outside of Ada’s control. Through this experience, the Ogbanji narrator noted they were “distressed at this re-forming” (Emezi 123). The experience of gender transition and transnational relocation are linked by the narrator noting a similar distress being “Raged at the displacement of a new country”, thereby clarifying that, for Ada, these transitional experiences impose a confinement rather than affording new freedoms (Emezi 47).  In contrast, Orlando’s experience through transition, despite offering a loose challenge to the project of nationhood, remains relatively free. Karen Kaivola has pointed out that “postrevolutionary public space opened up a range of potentially more inclusive political configurations that, given the period’s egalitarian rhetoric, might not have excluded women” (Kaivola p.142). As such, Orlando still manages to navigate the land with limited issues. They dressed in “Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex” (Woolf 89). The Constantinople episode in Orlando thus emerges as a confluence point between transnational migration and gender transition, forcing the reader to consider the complex freedoms and restrictions placed on trans bodies in a transnational context. That Orlando can so freely transgress the gender binary while traversing national boarders is evidence of the privilege they are afforded through wealth and the general condition of being white. While Ada’s experience remains relatively confined because of their comparatively lower racial and class position.

The different relationships that Ada and Orlando have with private property offer further insights into the relationship between nation and gender and, consequently, the freedoms and restrictions faced by the two. As already stated, Orlando is a comfortable member of the landed gentry being born in a house of “365 bedrooms” that had been “in the possession of her family for four of five hundred years” (Woolf 95). After their transition they enter a somewhat liminal space where it is unclear whether they will remain in possession of this property. Firstly, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, they end up joining a gypsy tribe, which is significant as gypsies “stand for the very principle of resistance to the nation/state” (Berman 233). As such, Orlando’s transcultural migration offers a new freedom of transition both in terms of gender as the gypsies don’t make the same distinction between men and women, and in terms of nation. However, Orlando experiences this as a form of confinement given their wealthy background; the Gypsies observe Orlando’s class position as that of a “profiteer or robber who snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth” (Woolf 95). Ironically, it is Orlando who feel’s dispossessed and consequently compelled to leave the tribe and return to England as a woman. Although Orlando faces restrictions in their return to England as a woman, namely legal issues arising regarding their entitlement to property, they manage to overcome these with relative ease, continuing to occupy their property and eventually being acquitted of all accusations. Once again, Orlando’s class position as a weatlthy white person, even in occupying a trans body, affords them relative freedom of movement.

        Ada on the other hand, as a racialised trans body faces a greater degree of confinement in terms of movement particularly in property. When Ada and Ewan get engaged and marry, they move into an apartment in Brooklyn. While it’s conceivable that the together Ada and Ewan might have been able to afford rent, when their relationship breaks down it has financial implications for Ada’s family as Saachi is left with a “huge loan which she cosigned for [Ewan]” (Emezi 161). As such, Ada is relatively restricted by external factors as she is positioned as a financial dependant of her parents and a subject of the extractive practice of debt finance. This confinement is mirrored by her relationship with her own subjectivity. When her relationship with Ewan breaks down, her mental condition deteriorates, and she does a brief stint in a mental hospital. She also engages in a few toxic sexual relationships, including one who moves into the apartment in which she lived with Ewan. Her confinement to this apartment transforms it into a palimpsest upon which negative experiences continue to be superimposed. The culmination of Ada’s experiences of confinement is a crescendo of breaking free; After her suicide attempt, Ada begins to discover medical words for transition as the antithesis for her self-harm. Rocío Cobo-Piñero identifies that this part of the narrative begins to synthesise “the spiritual realm and the medical/therapeutical worlds, which is apt given that Ada’s parents are a nurse and a doctor”. Ultimately undergoing sex reassignment surgery allows for a resolution of the confinement associated with her condition by bringing together elements from her past and present to define a new future. More precisely, she is allowed to find freedom within the confinement of her racial and class positions as she begins to experience herself as her own subject rather than just a vessel through which others get to experience their own desires.

In considering the themes of freedom and confinement in Freshwater and Orlando, racial and class dynamics emerge as a key factor in defining one’s ability to traverse both gender and national borders. Although the primary characters in both texts are trans and undergo transnational journeys, their contrasting experiences of freedom and confinement can primarily be explained by their racial and class differences. While the struggle for trans liberation and struggle against racial othering have parallels, a conscious critical effort is required to garner solidarity. Being trans is not inherently queer as queerness is a conscious practice of resisting the dominant symbolic order. Ada’s body, as it falls into a racialised category, often falls victim to these power structures, while Orlando, as a white person, primarily benefits from them.  In many ways, both texts inform modern trans narratives; in the contemporary moment, many trans people are forced to undertake a transnational migration to access healthcare. Trans people are therefore forced to consider, the “politics of mobility” embodied by the prefix ‘trans’ (Halberstam 173). The politics of mobility are the politics of freedom and confinement, and considering both terms in Freshwater and Orlando has unlocked the possibility for radical interventions into our understanding of trans subjectivity.

Berman, Jessica. “Is the trans in transnational the trans in transgender?” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 24, no. 2, 2017, pp. 217–244, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2017.0019.

Cobo-Piñero, Rocío. “Queering the Black Atlantic: Transgender spaces in Akwaeke Emezi’s writing and visual art.” Cultural Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 2022, pp. 280–297, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2104893.

Emezi, Akaweke. Freshwater. Faber & Faber, 2019.

Kaivola, Karen. “Revisiting Woolf’s representations of androgyny: Gender, race, sexuality, and nation.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 18, no. 2, 1999, pp. 235–261, https://doi.org/10.2307/464448.

Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, 1998.

Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 14, no. 2–3, 2008, pp. 191–215, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2007-030.

Woolf, Virgina. Orlando. Penguin Classics, 2020.

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Hello! My contribution this month is going to be an essay that I actually wrote for one of my classes. The class is Literatures of Place in which we’ve been discussing how spaces become places and how that manifests in literature. I've been particularly interested in the concept of writing place since I started my first undergrad studying architecture. I remember attending a writing workshop - this was early during the Covid-19 pandemic – on exactly this topic of writing place. I found the work that was being produced fascinating because there was this wonderful intimacy in what people were sharing. I think there was a unique moment that happened during lockdowns where people, certainly myself, became deeply acquainted with the area that lay within a five-kilometre radius of our dwellings. I suspect that this level of intimacy, born out of an intense familiarity, is core to how we create a sense of home. Adjacent to this are ideas of permanence, or at least a sense of permanence. Lockdown was not permanent (perhaps the psychological effects were/are, but that is a different debate), yet the moments that occurred within lockdown had an overwhelming sense of permanence. There is security in that. And oppression. And I’m not sure where in that in between my experience lay.

I sometimes feel similar within the present economic conditions. Mark Fisher’s line that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, however cliché, I guess is relevant here. I feel a sense of permanence within this economic situation and within this crisis. That “young people will never own a house” is frequently in our media doesn’t help with this. I think this is part of why I started this project – I want to find and document the intimate moments that happen, because they do happen, in spite of this crisis. I want to understand how they happen, and how we can make more of them happen, together.

Anyway, the essay I have written for this module is about the concept of home in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, and a collection of poetry written in in the 1930’s by Muriel Rukeyser called The Book of the Dead. Both pieces of work create road narratives full of movement and the tension of liminality and states of in-between-ness. I think what I’ve concluded from writing this is that movement and permanence are coequal factors in fostering a sense of home. Which is a strange and tricky thing to balance. But I’m excited to figure out how to manage it. Enjoy.

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When discussing literatures of place, it is impossible to ignore the adjacent concepts bound up in our ideas of place, namely belonging and home, and how they interact with other now necessary aspects of life, such as movement and migration. Home and migration are seemingly antithetical concepts: home suggests a sense of permanence/settlement/occupation while migration suggests movement or transition. These two concepts interact in complex ways in Muriel Rukeyser’s collection of poems The Book of the Dead, and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, both of which build road narratives that embody a sense of migration and transition while simultaneously constructing and deconstructing ideas belonging and home. Using the framework of liminality as outlined by Dara Downey et al. in Landscapes of Liminality, in addition to critical geography and migration studies, the following essay will discuss how both Rukeyser and McCarthy explore ideas of belonging and home within migration narratives.

When discussing the work of Muriel Rukeyser and Cormac McCarthy, the inherent liminality in the narratives they create comes to the fore, which has significant implications for understandings of the idea of home within each of their texts. In Landscapes of Liminality, Downey et al discuss the concept of liminality particularly in terms of how it relates to the concept of space and place, outlining that “Liminal spaces are those which are, simultaneously, place and space”, where space represents a broad concept while place suggests a degree of specificity, particularly in relation to the what and the who that occupy the place (Downey et al. 3). It is this tension between space and place that emerges in both The Book of the Dead and The Road. In The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser explores the atrocity faced by largely migrant and black labourers who worked mining through pure silica in order to achieve basic survival. Despite the insecure conditions in which they work, something drives the workers to continue working. Similarly in The Road the boy and the father are not afforded a sense of place as they undertake a journey south to escape insecure conditions that immediately threaten their lives. The pair repeatedly sleep rough and rarely stay in one fixed location. The motivations behind continuing through the borderlands, in both texts, is a longing for something beyond. Downey et al clarify that the word liminality comes from the Latin ‘Limen’ which meant harbour or threshold. This concept of a port/harbour/threshold has most certainly taken on new meaning in era of global financial capitalism and climate change. As such, interrogating the liminality within The Road and The Book of the Dead can offer us insights not just to how home was created then but insights into what we think about when we think about home in our present context.

         The dialectical tension between the idea of home and migration has been the subject of recent studies in critical geography and migration. David Ralph and Lynn Staeheli in their article ‘home and migration: mobilities, belongings and identities’ explore how migrants manage to create and maintain a sense of home while being literally dislocated from a homeland. The framework they outline is one that conceptualises “the simultaneity of home as sedentarist and as mobile” (Ralph and Staeheli 518). This is particularly pertinent when considering Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Obviously, the man and the boy don’t have what might popularly be considered a home. Yet, they endeavour to maintain a sense of home through familiarity with the objects that they carry with them. Chris Walshe has noted that the landscape created by McCarthy is “unsettled and thoroughly undomesticated” while the man and his son “keep trudging on with their shopping cart”, with the shopping cart offering a sense of groundedness for the pair during their journey (Walshe 50). A relationship with objects thus emerges as vital to how home is constructed in both texts; objects provide a grounding and a connection to the security of the past amid the insecurity of the present. 

It is thus clear that a sense of belonging hinges our relations with objects that remind us to the past. Such objects are necessarily loaded with meaning and situate us within a social context. Downey et al have clarified that “we define our position in relation to others, establishing limits, boundaries, borders, or other such markers to help determine our sense of place amid the expansive, perhaps unrepresentable extension of space" (Downey et al. ix). This is vital when considering McCarthy’s novel; the man and the boy seemingly travel through an unrepresentable extension of space as they travel south for whatever undisclosed reason. On their journey they rarely come across other people and when they do, with the guidance of the father, they are treated with caution and scepticism. The first time they come across another traveller it is after a fire storm had swept across the path the man and they boy were traveling. Instead of continuing over the “hot black mastic” into which the fire had transformed the road, they decided to camp until morning when the road would have cooled and hardened (McCarthy 50). Upon waking they came across a “set of tracks cooked into the tar” left by a traveller who must have passed while the pair were sleeping (50). When asked by the boy “who is it?” the man replied curtly “I don’t know. Who is anybody?” (50). The father’s cynicism at the boy’s curiosity as to the identity of the other indicates that the idea of identity has been completely deconstructed within the world created by McCarthy. The position thus defined by the man in relation to the other traveller is one of cautious distance that affords no capacity for generosity, unlike the boy who throughout the novel maintains an innocent desire to give and generate community and interact with others.

This understanding of the world is not just limited to the man. While the pair pass the traveller, he “looked down. As though he had done something wrong” (51), thereby projecting an internalised sense of failure. That the man says he was “struck by lightning” indicates a downplaying of the situation; the man wants to believe that it was an unlikely event that the man was mutilated and burnt rather than conceptualising him as a victim of a universal experience which might compel them to stand together and resist. Although the boy expresses interest in helping the other traveller, the man firmly believes that “there’s nothing to be done for him”, cementing the pairs existence as apart from the few other individuals who still manage to travel the road (51). It is this lack of capacity for building solidarity that engenders the issue faced by the characters in The Road; without solidarity and a collective sense of responsibility it is hard to feel a sense of obligation and thus a sense of belonging within a certain space. The man and the boy, therefore, perpetually meander through this unrepresentable extension of space without ever getting a chance to settle. That the book ends with the man dying before they reach any destination is the highest representation of the fact that a sense of home is not something that can be achieved by the man and the boy in this novel.

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         The man’s relationship with the world around and particularly other people treating them with scepticism and fear is one that has likely been interpellated because of his experience within that world. Moreover, throughout the story he is imposing this identity and world view on the child who by the end begins to experience this hyper vigilance and individualisation. Teaching and education thus emerge as important considerations for how we create a sense of place and by extension sense of home. Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead is undoubtably a text that is intent on teaching but does so to resist social atomisation as experienced by the man and the boy in The Road. The Federal Writers Project (FWP) was established as part of the new deal following the 1929 wall street crash to provide relief for writers who were out of work. The two primary projects that came out of the FWP, The American Guides series and their offshoot the Highway Guides series, were intent on educating Americans about America. Although Rukeyser’s project was not a part of the FWP, Catherine Gander has noted that the close publication of Rukeyser’s collection of poetry U.S. 1 and the highway guidebook of the same name represents the “ideological confluence of Rukeyser's work with the WPA Guides” insofar as she took it as her duty to educate about the atrocities being carried out against migrant/black workers (Gander 179). Rukeyser’s work not only reveals how home is created but how that idea is systematically controlled, repressed, and deconstructed, deliberately and viciously at the hand of capital.

The Liminality of Rukeyser’s project becomes important for considering how the message she seeks to convey is taught. There is a bifold liminality within the work: liminality of the form and of the narrative. The liminality of the form of her text is found in the fact that she is writing as a migrant writer, passing through, the experience is temporary, a journey – crucially she is writing about a community (poor, black) to whom she does not belong but with whom she experiences deep solidarity. Liminality of the form gives rise to the liminality of the narrative: it is a narrative of struggle, of labour process of building tunnel but also struggle for justice. The liminality experienced through Migration often entails restriction of the language available to understand and describe experience. Melanie Otto has noted “the problems of immigrants are often similar to problems faced by the visual artist: the struggle to find meaning in the absence of written or spoken language and negotiate a sense of uncertainty and displacement” (Downey et al. 139) – this was the exact problem faced by Rukeyser when coming to characterise her project. In 1949 she confessed that “I should like to use another word: 'audience' or 'reader' or 'listener' seems inadequate. I suggest the old word 'witness,' which includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence” (qtd. Gander 180).  The problems faced by migrants such as not having framework to understand foreign land are the same problem faced by Rukeyser as the artist, ideas of viewer, reader observer did not fit the project she was undertaking. Her project is one of solidarity building, one must witness and feel the affect of atrocity to form community; Rukeyser bears witness to the atrocity carried out by union carbide and seeks to communicate that in a way that her reader can understand the nature of the company’s guilt. In so doing she encourages a sense of trans temporal community with the victims of the past that ultimately has the capacity to challenge how we view our relations with our own community and, by extension, with the concept of home in our present.

Rukeyser’s poem ‘The Statement’ is a perfect example of this process of bearing witness. The poem takes the form of a back and forth the between an interviewer (Rukeyser) and interviewee (Miss Allen). The same way a lawyer may prompt a witness in a court room, Rukeyser uses Allen to educate the reader, who occupy the space of a jury, on the guilt of Union Carbide. Miss Allen clarifies “2000 men were/employed there/ period, about 2 years”. She clarifies “in tunnel No.1 it ran 97-99% pure silica”. She clarifies “the contractors/knowing pure silica … neglected to provide the workmen with any safety/device....” (Rukeyser 66). Through this interaction the reader learns that “[Union Carbide] were developing the power” (67). The ambiguity of the word power here invites multivalent interpretations; in one sense they are literally developing the power infrastructure as the tunnel is being dug to feed a hydroelectric power plant at Hawks nest, however Union Carbide are simultaneously consolidating power over the workers as their bodies are monopolised and physically transformed and destabilised.

This destabilisation of the body occurs simultaneously with the destabilisation of a sense of home. Mastoureh Fathi posits home making requires three elements: “security, familiarity and control”, (Fathi 981). Union Carbide has denied their workers all three of these elements. They have no security through the fact that workers live in company houses. Catherine Venable Moore in her introduction to Rukeyser’s collection notes of the housing situation that “the company burned down the camps when the project was completed” (Rukeyser 32); once the work dried up the physical security of a house was denied to the workers. Familiarity is denied through the fact that the workers are largely migrants and are thus not afforded a sense of “space, stability, routine, continuity or even permanence” (Fathi 981). Control is denied on the most personal level through the confiscation of bodily autonomy; the failure to provide safety equipment resulted in most of the workers developing silicosis, a product of inhaling fine silica dust slowly turning one’s lungs into stone. Rukeyser’s project of bearing witness implicates union carbide not just for the fact that they caused the literal deaths of a thousand workers, but also responsible for the symbolic death of community by denying the people a capacity for building a sense of home.

From the readings of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road we can conclude that home is not something that is necessarily situated in space but something that is created through a process of situating oneself in relation to others. This process is a constant struggle and one that is always already happening. The migration narratives created by the two authors help us understand what Ralph and Staeheli outline that “Debates over belonging to home are thus intrinsically debates over power and who controls it” (Ralph and Staeheli 526). That the man and the boy in The Road fail to build solidarity with the others who travel the road results in their atomisation and leaves them longing for home while never actually achieving it. Meanwhile Rukeyser’s narrative is one of a struggle to challenge power that reveals solidarity and collective responsibility to be at the core of home building.

Works Cited

Downey, Dara, et al. Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place. Rowman et Littlefield International, 2016.

Fathi, Mastoureh. “Home-in-migration: Some critical reflections on temporal, spatial and sensorial perspectives.” Ethnicities, vol. 21, no. 5, 2021, pp. 979–993.

Gander, Catherine. “The senses of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead.” European Journal of American Culture, vol. 30, no. 3, 2011, pp. 175–194, https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac.30.3.175_1.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Picador, 2007.

Ralph, David, and Lynn A. Staeheli. “Home and migration: Mobilities, belongings and identities.” Geography Compass, vol. 5, no. 7, July 2011, pp. 517–530, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00434.x.

Rukeyser, Muriel, et al. The Book of the Dead. West Virginia University Press, 2018.

Walshe, Chris. “The Post-Southern Sense of Place in ‘The Road.’” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 6, Sept. 2008, pp. 48–54, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00434.x.

There is an interesting moment occurring within the contemporary political landscape. A relatively small, yet vocal minority political actors, often labelled as the “far-right”, have weaponised the success of the neoliberal project in cementing housing as a financialised commodity to Launch an attack on two groups in particular: Migrants and Trans people. This attack is obviously a destructive one that only serves to harm our communities that have already been decimated by years of austerity and gentrification. So why is it that these two groups are receiving the blame for something that they (generally) had no hand in planning and (generally) have no power to change? In my previous two essays I’ve explored the solidarity that exists between these two groups when it comes to traversing borders, both literal and symbolic. However, another crucial aspect to consider is the impact on the subjectivity of migrants and trans people through this trans/national/cultural trespassing, and the impact on the subjectivities of the members of the communities within which they ultimately reside.

On the eve of a referendum set to take place in Ireland on International Women’s Day, seeking to redefine both the legal definition of a family and removing the controversial clause in the Irish constitution that states that a woman’s is in the home, I want to try and unpack some of these ideas that present rather beautifully in Torrey Peters debut novel Detransition, Baby. In particular, this essay will look at the definitional slippages between house/home, community/family and the integral role that desire plays in the discourse on housing.

Detransition, Baby is a novel about transition in all definitions of the word. It traces the story of Reese, a trans woman, and Ames, formerly Amy, formerly James, who is a (former) transexual, but who in the present of the novel is beginning to reinvent his life as a man. Reese and Ames are former lovers, however their relationship ended alongside Ames’ brief period living as Amy. That Ames decided not to revert to his original deadname but instead to pick a new name – Ames – suggests his detransition was more of a retransition. When probed by Katriona, his new lover “So even though you detransitioned, you still consider yourself transgender?”, he responds with “I don’t think it’s something you outgrow” (Peters 96). As such, Ames’ new identity can be read as a palimpsest on top of his old ones, but one that is fundamentally forward looking, despite the suggestion of retrospection, reversal, undoing that is present in the prefix de-.

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This constant tension between looking back and looking forward becomes fundamental to the novel’s narrative structure. The novel takes place across two timelines, divided between chapters set before the conception of Katrina’s pregnancy with Ames, and chapters set after conception, which I’m taking to be the novels present. The looking to the past provides vital context for how we read the novels present. Reese and Amy’s relationship takes place in the novels past; however the implications of that relationship continue to play out in the novels present through the fact that Ames asks Reese to become a third parental partner in the upbringing of Katrina and Ames’ child. That there is context for that relationship is vital as it provides the foundations for growth within the novel, without which the dynamics could easily descend into violence.

In chapter three Ames draws a comparison between millennial trans women, those who started to medically transition in the 2010’s, and juvenile elephants. Citing an essay titled ‘Elephant breakdown’, the novel explains how in 2002, park rangers in a game reserve in South Africa had to hunt down and kill a gang of three juvenile elephants that “had made sport of chasing, raping, and killing rhinoceroses” with similar incidents of enraged elephants attacking homes and villages in Sierra Leone and Uganda (97). Juvenile elephants had also taken to physical violence against one another constituting a “fifteen hundred percent increase in elephant-on-elephant violence over the previous decades” (98).

The essay Elephant Breakdown presented an argument that diverged from the previous accepted truth that younger elephants simply had increased testosterone levels and were increase competition for reduced resources, instead arguing that juvenile elephants suffered from chronic stress as a hang up of intergenerational trauma inflicted by millennia of hunting, and the hyper depopulation resulting from mechanised poaching. It’s noted that the “millennial generation of elephants is an orphan generation” with no elders, no capacity to learn culture and community from what came before, which develops into sadness that manifests in violence (98). Ames argues that Trans women are much like juvenile elephants, that they are a “lost generation” with “no elders”, having lost a significant portion of the older generation to “HIV, poverty, suicide, repression or … medicalisation” (99).

The intergenerational trauma, the lack of capacity for intergenerational learning has caused the effective cessation of the reproduction of community/culture. Instead, the characters in the book are left at a crossroads, with no map to follow, left only with an opportunity to regress into a manufactured, idealised version of the past, or forge a path, to begin the production of something radically imaginative and new, something in accordance with our true material desire.

It must be stated that this cultural murder hasn’t taken place in a vacuum and is not a unique experience of the queer community. The AIDS epidemic, poverty and suicide are all products of the neoliberal system. During the AIDS crisis in the 80’s and 90’s, the private healthcare system and the monopoly afforded to private pharmaceutical companies meant that essential medication that could have saved millions of lives was only afforded to those of means. Those that perished were the proletariat, the poor, the marginalised, workers, people of colour, migrants. We see similar effects from the monopoly afforded to private housing providers, aka landlords, aka thieves. 68% of people in Ireland under the age of 30 still live with their parents, primarily because housing is unaffordable for those working low wage jobs, and the housing that is out there often offers little privacy or freedom.

What this has resulted in is a delay in young adults maturing, with young millennials and gen z-ers reaching certain maturity milestones much later in life than previous generations would have. This isn’t just a problem in Ireland. It’s been noted that generally young people don’t have as much sex as they used to. Not that sex is the be all and end all of culture, but it is a foundational element, intimacy, expression of passion and vulnerability which cannot be expressed through digital communication. It is this degree of vulnerability, this ability to appear raw to one another and to experience a sense of obligation to another that underlies our capacity for building community. Eimear Walshe’s piece on The Land Question provides a great sexual framing for the argument towards land redistribution. Their piece deserves its own essay but for now, we can take it that there is an explicit link between the politics of desire and the politics of ownership.

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Bearing all of this in mind, we can conclude the neoliberal economics, the expansion of private markets and state sponsored monopolies are forms of violence inflicted upon our communities. Violence begets trauma, and sadness, and it is in times of sadness that we seek clarity in the past through our elders. But how can we do that when the past no longer exists?  And how can we do that if our elders have become agents of capital through home ownership and thus have a different understanding and material standpoint?

It is in these conditions that the far right can thrive by manufacturing an idea of the past that reifies the nuclear family into something that is fixed, an idea that has never been and will never be. Community has always been core to raising children. Crude systems of mutual aid, sharing of resources and time was the force that bound public housing communities together. There has always been a oneness between community and family. That we are all now encouraged to live in dispersed, atomised boxes is a new phenomenon, a symptom of neoliberal capitalism. There is a necessary solidarity between trans people, migrants, the dispossessed and generally all those who don’t benefit from the systems of ownership that govern our society. Our present challenge is bringing this idea to the fore of our imagination and not getting caught up arguing with the false terms presented by the far right.  

Unlike the far right, Peters possess a radical imagination that seeks not to reinvent what was, but to reorientate our conceptions of what may be by imagining material solidarity. Much like the comparison with the baby elephants, Peters draws an unlikely solidarity between trans people and divorced people. During Reese and Katrina’s first encounter at the GLAAD awards, coordinated by Ames, Reese confesses that divorced cis women are her “favourite people on earth” (Peters 164). For Reese, “divorce is a transition story”, insofar as divorced people, like trans people, must undergo a journey without any guidance, departing from “the narratives given to them since girlhood”, and proceed into the narrative vacuum, often alone, to try and make sense of what life has come to (165). Given her lack of trans elders to learn from, it is from older, experienced divorced women that she feels can teach her the way through the murky waters of being trans:

“I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who will have to move forward without infesting in new illusions or turning bitter … Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don’t really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return” (Peters 165).

          It is on this solidarity that Peters builds the rest of the narrative. Once this fundamental understanding is reached, Reese, Ames and Katrina can enter a space of mutual exchange, bonding and growth. They are able to enter spaces of radical forward looking and imagination. At one point, towards the end of the novel, it’s disclosed that Ames had taken to “brainstorming prodigiously” the logistical viability of their triad (270). In so doing he recalled an example of a friend of his and Reese’s, a trans man named Quentin who was in a long-term relationship with his cis boyfriend. After being awarded a “plush hospital job”, the couple bought a derelict house on the lake shore of Chicago. They then remodelled the house to have two separate living quarters as though it was being subdivided into two separate apartments. However, the living spaces were left freely connected by a wooden staircase. A lesbian couple then moved in upstairs, and the cis boyfriend donated sperm to the couple, who subsequently gave birth to two children. The children were free to inhabit the house as they pleased, being able to trespass freely between the threshold of each quasi-separate dwelling.

The removal of borders that we are interpellated to believe necessary in our lives, in this case, proved to generate something far more constructive, far more pragmatic, and generous for all parties. Obviously, it’s important to consider the class privilege of the people involved here, Quentin is a doctor, and crucially, a homeowner which offers him access to movement that is not afforded to those who don’t possess spatial autonomy. Notwithstanding, this is still a potent example of how things can change if we allow ourselves to imagine, generate solidarity, and transform that solidarity into material action. It allows us to begin to broach the question of why the fuck we all live in inappropriate, inefficient dwelling spaces not designed for us?

          So where does this leave us with how we think about housing? I think, as is clear from my previous essay, fostering material solidarity is vital in order to build community as an act of resistance. We have always been stronger together, and to come together we must look past what makes us different and towards what makes us the same. Peters does this in Detransition, baby to great effect, which excites me, and I think it’s something that those who seek to resist oppression can learn from.

          I think it’s also important to remember that there is no such thing as a final solution to the housing crisis. The ending of Peters’ novel perfectly represents this fact. We end on a non-conclusion, unclear as to whether or not Katrina is going to keep the baby or get an abortion. It leaves us unclear as to whether this radical imagination will turn into something that can be. In a sense I feel the same about concluding this essay – I don’t want to offer an absolute conclusion because there is no end to the crisis. All we can do is manage, through community, support networks and organised resistance. This is the mission of CATU – Community Action Tenants Union – which, if you are a tenant or renter, you should absolutely join. It is our duty to conclude the narrative that Peters has begun, to translate her radical imagination into radical action.

          Thanks so much again for reading my narrative dwellings on dwelling narratives. With each essay, I feel like I’m getting a little bit closer to answering the question of “what exactly am I trying to do here?”, and I really appreciate having people to share my ideas with – building a community if you will, heh. I hope my thoughts have provoked some curiosity.  Below I have included a selected bibliography of things I have read/watched which I may not have directly referenced but that have absolutely influenced my thought process here. As always, please feel free to share this with people who you believe may find these pieces interesting and insightful. I find comfort in an audience that shares my interest and from whom I may be fortunate enough to learn.

Selected bibliography

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. British Broadcasting Corp., 2012.

Chu, Andrea Long. Females. Verso Books, 2019.

Peters, Torrey. Detransition, Baby. Penguine, 2021.

Walshe, Eimear, The Land Question: Where the Fuck Am I Supposed to Have Sex. Eva, 2021. https://www.eva.ie/thelandquestion/

Thorn, Abigail “Why we can’t build better cities” 2024. Accessable here

I’m a housing activist.

I’m hesitant to proclaim that I’m an activist – doing so seems disingenuous. Activism should be defined by actually doing something to evoke change, not just acting with the intention to be seen to be doing something. I cringe a little bit when I see somebody has put activist in their twitter bio because that signals that they care about people seeing them perhaps more than they care about the changes they claim to fight for.

So why do I bring it up?

I guess I needed something to frame this essay, which will be derived from two books. The first is the interesting, experimental novel, Diego Garcia. Co-written by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, the novel is an attempt at writing solidarity, telling the story of the British-American collusion in forcibly evacuating the island of Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian ocean. The second book is David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, which explores the complex ideas we have about debt. Starting first by deconstructing the myth of barter, Graeber explores the moral underpinnings of the concept of debt and concluding with a chronological analysis of debt throughout the ages.

The first connection between the two books is a year: 1971. In Debt, Graeber breaks the history of debt down into four distinct ages: The Axial Age (800 BC – 600 AD), The Middle Ages (600 AD-1450 AD), The Age of the Great Capitalist Empires (1450 – 1971), and then the current age, beginning in 1971, the essence of which is “yet to be determined”. The four ages which he devises represent the flip-flopping in the cycle of history between bullion-based currencies (i.e. currencies underpinned by gold, silver, and other precious commodities), and credit-based currencies (i.e. debt).

Graeber cites 1971 as the beginning of a new age is because on August 15^th, 1971, the government of the United States, under president Nixon, announced that foreign held U.S. Dollars would no longer be convertible into gold, thereby abandoning the last vestiges of the international gold standard. This decision, according to Graeber, effectively ended the previous age of capitalist expansion, which was underpinned by the dominance of bullion-based currency. The immediate effect of Nixon’s decision was that the price of gold skyrocketed, which meant the value of the U.S. gold reserves stored in Fort Knox skyrocketed. This balanced the books of the U.S. treasury, which had been running a considerable deficit to finance the Vietnam War:

“Nixon floated the dollar in order to pay for the cost of a war in which, during the period of 1970-73 alone, he ordered more than four million tons of explosives and incendiaries dropped on cities and villages across indochina - causing one senator to dub him "the greatest bomber of all time". The debt crisis was a direct result of the need to pay for the bombs, or, to be more precise, the cast military infrastructure required to deliver them. This was what was causing such an enormous strain on the U.S. gold reserves. Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure "fiat money" - mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be. In that case, one could well argue that U.S. military power was now the only thing backing up the currency. In a certain sense this is true, but the notion of "fiat money" assumes that money really "was" gold in the first place. Really we are dealing with another variation of credit money." (Graeber 364)

The fact that the U.S. dollar shifted from being a bullion backed currency to one essentially underpinned by the United States military dominance has interesting implications for our reading of Diego Garcia the novel. The story of Diego Garcia the island is one defined by neo-colonialism and the expansion of U.S. military power. In 1965, the United States government expressed to the British government an interest in the island to establish a strategic military base. The British government then coerced Mauritus, a then colony of the British Empire, to cede the Chagos Archipelago to Britain as a condition for Mauritian independance. In 1968, the forced expulsion of the 950 odd inhabitants of the island, finally completed in 1973, made way for the creation of the large Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia. That the occupation began after 1971 is notable because as Graeber pointed, the previous time when currency flip flopped from bullion to credit, during the transition from The Axial Age into The Middle Ages, was followed by a resounding collapse of military and imperial expansion globally. In the last 50 years however, the American empire has continued to expand its boarders by, establishing and expanding overseas military operations, of which the occupation of Diego Garcia is just one pertinent example. Given that this military expansion is financed by debt generated through the issuance of U.S. Treasury bonds has resulted in much of the world’s credit – the same credit which we use to buy cars and houses – to be underpinned by U.S. Military spending and colonial activity.

Diego Garcia the novel begins in 2014 with the introduction of two friends, Damaris Caleemootoo and Oliver Pablo, living in Edinburgh, Scotland. It emerges that the pair have fled London following the tragic death of Daniel, Oliver’s brother. However, the two are essentially living in debt exile. Damaris frequently receives calls from unknown numbers which she assumes belong to debt collectors, and a number which she has saved as “debtfuckersdontanswer”. Oliver Pablo doesn’t receive the same phone calls, but that’s because he gave his phone away on the train to Edinburgh. Rest assured he is equally in debt:

“If it makes you feel any better he said, I have less money than you, I mean when you count how much I owe. Tell me, she said. Will it make you feel better? She nodded. He thought for a while. I don’t know. I know who I owe money to though. I have an overdraft from HSBC, and another from Co-op, a handful of student loans, a bank loan I took out when we couldn’t pay the rent last year, credit card debt I pass from one card to another whenever they send me an offer. What else? A bike-to-work scheme loan. But you lost your job and your bike got stolen! Yes he said, but I still owe the money.” (Soobramanien and Wiliams 38-9)

There is a certain bourgeois reading of this that sees Oliver and Damaris as financially irresponsible, but having read Debt I feel like the pair’s situation takes on a more universal quality. He outlined that since the Nixon shock in 1971, which ultimately paved the way for the so-called Regan revolution (the financialisaton of everyday life), debt has become an integral part of life, so much so that “one must go into debt to achieve a life that goes in any way beyond sheer survival” (Graeber 379). Need a car? Loan. Need a house? Mortgage. New dishwasher? Finance. It can’t be the fault of Damaris and Oliver that they are in debt when there are (legally protected) creditors begging to extend us credit at every turn, just so they can then trade our debts for a profit in this complex global financial system.

Right here the connection between debt and its colonial underpinnings comes right to the fore, and it is consequently right at this point that the character of Diego is introduced. Diego is a mysterious character, and only appears for about four pages, yet his presence becomes a form of ghost that haunts the rest of the novel. When he is first introduced, He is sitting at a bus stop across the road from Damaris and Oliver, surrounded by “a heap of bags” (Soobramanien and Williams 25). He pulls out a mysterious black notebook which spikes curiosity and reminds Oliver of his brother Daniel. The pair’s view of Diego is then blocked by a bus with an advertisement for Wonga, the popular payday loan site in the UK. Oliver then talks to Daniel where they decide to meet again for a drink in the evening. In the pub we learn Diego’s is a poet and storyteller and that what he writes in his notebook are “wandering lines”, but when asked if they could be shared, he says “no, some poems are not for you” (42). We learn that Diego is not his real name, but a chosen name to reflect his mother’s past, who was an evictee from the island of Diego Garcia.

Diego, Damaris, and Oliver, although all from separate backgrounds, are united in the experience of running, forced migration and homeloss. Although Diego was not born on Diego Garcia, he was born too late to be entitled to British citizenship. As such, his experience of life is one of statelessness which is a form of homelessness. In my previous essay, The Dwell of Loneliness, I argued that the capacity for free migration, and free choice more broadly, unlocks the capacity for building home. Diego may be a product of diaspora and transnational migration, but that he lives with the legacy of the ongoing occupation of Diego Garcia means he is denied access to that crucial choice between home and away. Similarly, debt has resulted in the confiscation of that freedom from Damaris and Oliver, thus debt can be read as a tool of neo-colonialism that is stateless and invades the interpersonal realm.

Two types of solidarity thus emerge, the fictional solidarity within the novel and the real solidarity of the novel. Within the novel, the character of Damaris begins writing a piece called “Garde,” only fragments of which appear throughout the novel in the form of excerpts and notes, capturing the essence of post-colonial diasporic experience. Garde draws from the encounters with Diego and forms a solidarity between the imagined experience of Diego and the real experience of Olivers brother, Daniel. Daniel was a squatter, and he experienced mental illness which resulted in his death. The fictional solidarity written by Damaris is between the suffering experienced by Daniel and the Sagren – the word used by the Chagossians to describe the experience of sadness and loss resulting from colonial dispossession – experienced by Diego. While Oliver disapproves of this connection because Daniel was “white, middle class” (173), unlike Diego who was a racialised other, he was nevertheless living in a form of exile as a squatter, forging a home outside the bounds of what is approved by the state.

The solidarity of the novel however is the real solidarity between anyone who has ever been a victim of debt, and those who have experienced the trauma of forced eviction, forced migration. Damaris and Oliver are in exile, escaping debt peonage, while the people of Chagos are in exile, having been engaged in a fight for half a century trying to disentangle who owes what to whom. It is the interplay between fact and fiction in the novel that makes this construction so potent. Stretching the bounds of the fictional nature of the form of the novel, Soobramanien and Williams are keen to outline that “At the heart of this novel are two real events,” those being the death of Daneil, who was Luke Williams real brother, and the ongoing occupation of Diego Garcia. Of the later they wish to note “the facts of it, and their foundation in [the] fiction” created jointly by the British and the U.S. governments claiming that the island of Diego Garcia had no settled population. The solidarity of the novel connects the fictional narratives of debt that underpin the facts of colonialism, dispossession, and eviction.

If the novel Diego Garcia is an attempt at writing solidarity, then it’s surely a successful one. It uncovers a deep need to write and develop solidarity as an act of resistance. David Graeber offers a frank observation of the years since 1971 positing “it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures” (Graeber 382). Fostering solidarity, drawing equivalences between debt peons and dispossessed Chagossians, is key to resisting the sadness, Sagran, hopelessness. Moreover, through solidarity, we open the possibility for radical interventions into our universal human subjectivity, unlocking our ability to imagine a better present, a better future.

Thanks so much for reading my second essay! I feel like what I’ve written above quite neatly builds on what I’ve previously wrote about migration and gender in The Dwell of Loneliness, connecting themes of debt and finance which, through neo-liberalism, have invaded even the most intimate aspects of our lives. I think this is something that most people feel but don’t necessarily know, so I hope what I have written has helped to connect the fact that debt is fucking us collectively, and it’s rooted in the evils of colonial expansion.

I’m going to try and stick to a schedule of publishing on the first Sunday of every month, so if you enjoyed and haven’t already done so, please subscribe to my Narrative Dwellings on Dwelling narratives:

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In Solidarity,

Steph <3

Selected Bibliography

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5000 Years. Melville House, 2014.

Soobramanien, Natasha, and Luke Williams. Diego Garcia. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022.

I was recently tasked with writing an essay for one of my university classes arguing that John Radclyffe Hall’s destabilising 1928 work The Well of Loneliness maintains contemporary relevance. In it I argued that the novel is still relevant, mainly for its contributions to how we understand modern queer identities. While I stand by the arguments I made in that essay, the essay had a rather restrictive wordcount. As such, I had to leave out one of the more interesting points of relevance to our contemporary moment: Stephen Gordon’s access to housing.

I’m currently writing from a cold house in which I rent a bedroom for €400/month. By all accounts this is a good deal, I have plenty of friends who either have to live with their parents and sacrifice upwards of ten hours a week sitting on a bus, live in an adjacent town to the university, or spend about twice as much as what I am spending on a room similar to mine. I am fortunate and I am thankful for what I have access to. Yet, I find it hard to look at my surroundings, to look at my feet clad with two pairs of socks, my blanket and hot water bottle and consider myself well off, especially in comparison to Stephen Gordon.

Stephen Gordon is a comfortable member of the landed gentry. Born the daughter and only child to Sir Philip and Lady Anna Gordon, Stephen’s class position is prominent from the outset. The family’s principle private residence is a comfortable country seat called Morton Hall, located “not very far from Upton-on-Severn”. The house itself plays an important role throughout the novel, forming both a literal foundation for the text, occupying a place of prominence in the opening two paragraphs of the novel, and a symbolic foundation for Stephen Gordon. Morton Hall is the location where Stephen gets to begin to explore her sexual identity and desires; it is in that house where the seven year old Stephen develops her first same-sex crush on the family’s housemaid, it’s where she begins to ride horses astride as opposed to side saddle, and crucially, Sir Philip’s study in Morton Hall is the location where Stephen first discovers sexology and the language and framework through which she begins to understand her sexual identity. Even after Stephen leaves Morton it forms the backdrop against which everything is compared.

Given the symbolic significance of Morton Hall to the structure of The Well’s narrative, ideas of ownership and access to a home therefore become important to how we read The Well. Let’s take for instance the episode at the start of book three, after Stephen has been de facto evicted from Morton by her mother over the implicit sapphic relationship with Angela Crosby. Essentially forced into exile, Stephen takes up residence at a flat in London where she ends up writing and publishing her first book. She is however unhappy with this change; in describing the natural landscape of the city she paints a poignant picture of “trees along the Chealsea Embankment” with their trunks “blackened and soot clogged”. The industrial landscape of the Victorian city forms a contrasting backdrop to Stephen’s birthplace in Morton, one that fundamentally alters Stephen. In exile, her face grows “much thinner and more determined”, while her character becomes much more resigned. Notwithstanding the fact that she now lives much closer to the real poverty present in Victorian London, Stephen still lives in absolute comfort. Puddle manages Stephen’s accounts, so she never has to worry about money, and she maintains such luxury expenses as renting a stable and comfortable lodgings for her horse, Rafferty, and its groom, Jim, both of whom she took with her from Morton to London. Even though at this moment she is a tenant, it is still her familial wealth (in the form of rent generated through land ownership) that enables her to live comfortably. While she is a budding novelist, she is absolutely not reliant on her work for income. Ultimately it is wealth that grant’s her the freedom to move which ultimately allows her the liberty to explore her identity.

The politics of ownership and the politics of mobility thus become entangled, which has important implications for reading The Well as a trans narrative. In his book Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam draws the conclusion that:

“Gender variance, like sexual variance, cannot be relied on to produce a radical and oppositional politics simply by virtue of representing difference. Radical interventions come from careful consideration of racial and class constructions of sexual identities and gender identities and from a consideration of the politics of mobility outlined by that potent prefix ‘trans’.”

The trans in transgender necessarily implies movement across literal and symbolic borders. As gender is something that is constructed in the eyes of an other, having the ability to move between social groups and be surrounded by people who recognise our identity in the same way we do enables us to begin to experience our own subjectivity. For Stephen, this desire to experience her own subjectivity is ultimately what leads her to Paris. Through this it becomes even more clear how easy it is for Stephen to move through spaces and across borders. There is never any question whether Stephen will be able to afford to live in Paris as she nonchalantly buys a rather neglected yet stately courtyard residence.

I see both parallels and stark differences between Stephen’s journey and modern trans narratives. Stephen ultimately makes a transnational voyage that brings her to a destination where she is surrounded by other queer people and people who understand her. In a similar vein, many trans people in Ireland must travel abroad each year to access healthcare that enables them to experience their own subjectivity. The connecting tissue between traveling to accessing healthcare and buying a house lies within the forces that enable both: capital. Traveling to access healthcare oftentimes can incur large expenses (much like buying a house) which in turn mean’s it is only accessible to people who have a degree of wealth and privilege to begin with. While for some this might be an adventure, for many it entails stress and hardship and happens out of necessity rather than choice.

Choice is core both a sense of adventure as well as experiencing one’s own subjectivity. Considering Stephen’s experience of war further complicates what we’ve been talking about in terms of home, subjectivity, and adventure. For Stephen, war is something she wants. When WWI breaks out in the novel, Stephen is desperate to go to war, eventually being sent to the front as an ambulance driver. Her experience of this is one of adventure rather than necessity. This is in stark contrast to some of her comrades on the front, including her future lover Mary Lewellyn, a Welsh girl from a relatively poor class position. War for Mary is less of an adventure and more of a necessity as it is posed as her only opportunity to leave home and subsequently live as a lesbian. This sets up some interesting readings especially in terms of modern state military industrial complex. In the United States of America today for instance, joining the military is often the only way in which people can access basic public services like healthcare, and higher education through the G.I bill. No doubt it was the same for many poor soldiers conscripted during WWI. Does this mean the right to unconditionally experience one’s own subjectivity is only a right for those of means? It certainly seems to be when you consider how expensive it is to achieve anything that resembles independence.

Class background has profound implications for how we think about home. In the framework of The Well, home is constructed as something only available to wealthy people and, moreover, home is something that Stephen is only afforded the ability to create through transnational movement. She is ultimately able to create a home with Mary in Paris because she had the ability to choose to move to Paris, to go to war, to buy property. The politics of mobility is heavily entangled with the politics of ownership; both necessitate a degree of wealth as The Well of Loneliness clearly helps us understand. What The Well doesn’t help us understand is how we got here. How did the concept of ‘home’ become synonymous with ‘investment’ or ‘financial asset’? And, crucially, how do we move beyond this? These are the questions which I hope to begin to unravel in future Narrative Dwellings.

Thanks so much for reading! I hope what I have written has inspired you to think about something which you may not have thought about before. This is a new thing I want to start writing; I dwell a lot on the concept of housing, and I’m really interested in how literary narratives can help us to understand what we think about when we think about housing. My aim is to publish an essay a month for 2024 exploring the concept and representation of dwellings in literary narratives, what that can teach us about our current relationship with housing, and how that can inform how we move beyond the crisis.

So, stay tuned and please share this with people who you think might find this interesting. I look forward to writing again soon but in the meantime, enjoy dwelling on literary narratives!

In Solidarity,

Steph <3

Selected Bibliography

Berman, Jessica. “Is the trans in transnational the trans in transgender?” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 24, no. 2, 2017, pp. 217–244, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2017.0019.

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, 1998.

Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. Penguin Classics, 2015.

Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 1998, pp. 135–169.

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