Reply to comment

The other course I'll be teaching this fall is Critical Feminist Studies, with a focus on questions of transgender. Getting myself up to speed on those issues, I've been looking through The Transgender Studies Reader 2, where I've come upon several relevant-to-our project passages, with regards to how our environment shapes both our becoming and our writing:

* “cities built on grids probably help us become straight, insofar as how we move must affect how we are moved...the comfortable feeling of knowing where our bodies are at all times might not in fact be a very queer feeling…” (Lucas Cassidy Crawford, "Transgender Without Organs: Mobilizing a Geo-affective Theory of Gender Modification,” p. 477)

* “the etymology of ‘direct’ relates to ‘being straight’ or getting ‘straight to the point.’ To go directly is to follow a line without a detour, without mediation. Within the concept of direction is a concept of ‘straightness.’ To follow a line might be a way of becoming straight, by not deviating at any point” (Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 2006, p.16; qted in TSR2, p. 478).