ABSTRACT
“Inclusion” is a rhetoric of human resources and industry. It is a euphemism that travels into the workplace or the academy alongside others like “diversity” and “accessibility” in place of activist language like “justice.” Feminist critic Sara Ahmed (2021) has argued that this jargon and the systems that execute them often allow injustices to persist unchecked within the institution and can indeed obscure and even facilitate racist and gender-discriminatory actions and Dean Spade (2015) has also argued against the mainstreaming gestures of trans liberation that beget violence at an administrative level. When trans people are merely included in an organization, for instance, without other members who have the education, training, or empathy to support them, inclusion serves the institution’s optics while harming the actual individual being “included.” In literature and English departments, conversations about the canon necessitate conversations about inclusion. The selection of certain trans authored texts for inclusion on syllabi alongside invitations for trans readings of already canonical works create space for and representation of trans identity. At the same time, we can risk divorcing trans identity and theory from important critical context or reducing it to an overly simplistic extension of existing gender theory. This chapter will explore three contemporary trans authored texts that take a critical view of simple inclusion models: Kai Cheng Thom’s novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars (2016), Gretchen Felker-Martin’s apocalyptic horror novel Manhunt (2022), and the Bram Stoker erasure poem “R E D” by Chase Berggrun (2018).
