My research explores the way that literature (especially poetry) and philosophy (especially ontology) fashion complementary images and ideas about the possibility of radical change - I argue that this figuring of potentiality and change has come to stand in for the thinking and being of trans subjects, rendering "the trans subject" as a kind of conduit between thinking and being. The goal of this research is to show the way that this figure has occluded the actual thinking and being of these subjects, most problematically within the inter-community cultural and political writing of trans life.
My project engages in a study of the diametrical opposition between the two philosophers most concerned with ontology and the metaphysics of change and potentiality in the 20th and 21st centuries, Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger, and links this opposition to similar dilemmas in modernist, feminist, and contemporary poetic traditions which take up the figure of the trans subject.
I am an affiliate and coordinator at Concordia’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, where I extend the question of “poesis as making” to my own studies and field of inquiry.
Other than my scholarly work, I am also the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Presence Detection System (Hiding Press, 2019) and Thee Display (Documents/Anteism 2020). My poetic and critical work can be found (and is forthcoming) in a variety of print and online publications.