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hilaryreadsbooks's review
5.0
“Gender has never been simple because our bodies have never been simple.” -- THEM, Issue II
This opening remark by the THEM editing team summarizes simply the need for spaces like THEM lit for literature about bodies disrupting normalized boundaries (and thus congruously becoming literature disrupting normalized boundaries).
So many works in this collection capture the messy intertwining of gender and historical and ongoing violence against trans bodies, especially against trans bodies of color. In “When a Birth Certificate Hijacks a Body and Tells It to Speak or Forever Hold its Peace,” Alok Vaid-Menon wonders “if there would be gender if there / were no violence...if there would be body if / there were no trauma.” How do you reckon with identities that are tangled in violence? How do you handle trauma when the very thing that makes you you is continuously seeped in it?
We find scattering of these answers throughout. Large portions are on language. Jean Paoli asks for “new paradigms of misery” and a new language to describe this trauma, free of Western academia and identity politics found in mainstream literature. Lily Clifford calls out medical vocabulary that “carries gender.” This collection of work itself exists as an incomplete answer, perhaps posing more questions than answers.
This opening remark by the THEM editing team summarizes simply the need for spaces like THEM lit for literature about bodies disrupting normalized boundaries (and thus congruously becoming literature disrupting normalized boundaries).
So many works in this collection capture the messy intertwining of gender and historical and ongoing violence against trans bodies, especially against trans bodies of color. In “When a Birth Certificate Hijacks a Body and Tells It to Speak or Forever Hold its Peace,” Alok Vaid-Menon wonders “if there would be gender if there / were no violence...if there would be body if / there were no trauma.” How do you reckon with identities that are tangled in violence? How do you handle trauma when the very thing that makes you you is continuously seeped in it?
We find scattering of these answers throughout. Large portions are on language. Jean Paoli asks for “new paradigms of misery” and a new language to describe this trauma, free of Western academia and identity politics found in mainstream literature. Lily Clifford calls out medical vocabulary that “carries gender.” This collection of work itself exists as an incomplete answer, perhaps posing more questions than answers.
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