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TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly Volume 3 (3-4): Translating Transgender

By David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta, 2016

The cover image for this special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly reminds us of the dilemma of translating, of being-in-relation, of a moving copresence. Here, one embodied language does not replace another but befriends it, critiques it, touches it, transfuses it. Chilean travesti author Pedro Lemebel poses in a moment of multiple transfusions with her artistic collaborator Francisco Casas. We are to wonder: What is being projected on whom? Whose blood is in the tube? How many figures are there, and what is the ground upon which those figures become (in)dividual? Who are we to them, anyway? Is there a clear directionality at work, or a viscous simultaneity? Are they translations of one another? Are we? If so, must we be first disconnected, then individual, then countable, then substitutable?

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