TRANS ANIMISMS

Abstract

This article examines a handful of recent creative works that reflect speculatively on transgender pasts. I argue that each of these creative texts uses ontological interventions to reimagine moments in trans activist history that scholars have narrated only in terms of the attenuation of sociality and of political participation. These works do this by ratifying trans activists’ relations of reciprocity with extraordinary entities that are not often supported by secular and anthropocentric historiographies. Instead of engaging accounts of coalition work with extraterrestrials, nonhuman animals, and magical powers mainly as sites of “subjugated knowledges” (a reading that negates the agency of nonhuman beings and analyzes them only as effects of human belief), these creative works all consider the political capacitations afforded by trans collaborations with other-than-human agencies. In order to make this argument, I draw from the recent body of anthropological scholarship known as the “new animism,” and consider the absence of commentary on religion and secularism within the Anglo-American posthuman turn. Ultimately, beyond offering alternatives to historical declension narratives about trans activism, these works urge scholars to consider how relations with “subaltern” agentive forces have become increasingly important to disenfranchised communities’ efforts to negotiate the political debilitations of a post-neoliberal world.