Trans woman and doctor, me?

the trans shell and academic life

Abstract

By intertwining memory and poetry by trans authors, I relive my experiences as a student in the UnB graduate literature program while also discussing what it means for trans corporeality to occupy these spaces as I continue to develop as a researcher and professor. Constituting myself as a trans woman and a doctoral student is permeated by reflections on the importance of representation and representativeness. Thus, the trans political body begins with the contradictions and asymmetries of the world, felt firsthand, to invoke a spell: the word; an embodied word that transforms fragility into potentiality in the act of writing, which is constructed by fusing our personal experience and worldview with the social reality in which we live, our history, and our perspective.