ABSTRACT
Speech is one of the most powerful tools of protest. When it comes to transgender individuals, speech has the potential to disrupt historic accounts of silence and shame, vocalising queer experience and making transgender lives visible and audible. With an appreciation of its specific definitions and historical contexts, in this chapter “performance poetry” is used as an umbrella term that is necessarily flexible and captures various contemporary forms of oral poetry such as spoken word, slam, and online audio-visual strategies engaged by the poets featured in this chapter. Performance poetry brings together speech, political charge, performance, and poetry. Drawing inspiration from variously queer movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance, Beats, the Black Arts Movement and poetry of the HIV/AIDS crisis, transgender performance poetry in the twenty-first century is a site of radical creative potential. It occupies an expansive space, a “queer virtual stage” with theoretically boundless geographical potential, due to the popularity of spoken word in online spaces, often troubling and inviting deconstruction of spatial boundaries. Online performance poetry invites us to think digitally about poetry, performance, space, time, and motion. This paper examines poetry published or performed by American transgender performance poets between 2010 and the present, a significant period for technological advancement and transgender activism. The multimedia nature of these texts requires bringing together contemporary poetry scholarship, media studies and digital humanities. Through a queer theoretical lens, this chapter makes a case for the amplification of marginalised gender-nonconforming and transgender voices in a networked world, amid the growth of online platforms and infiltration of social media in everyday life. Online performance poetry written and performed by transgender poets on a “queer virtual stage” troubles spatial binaries, creates temporal ruptures between past, present, and future, and engages audio-visual strategies that speak to notions of movement, transition, and journey making. When confronted with continued legislative, media and political hostility, the virtual and physical visibility of transgender poets becomes an act of resistance and the poems analysed in this chapter bring nuanced insight into the diversity of transgender experience. This chapter suggests that multidisciplinary enquiry into online performance poetry as transgender literature navigates one of the most exciting and important literary spaces for representations of contemporary transgender lives.
