Corfman, Samuel Brook
(2024)
Beautiful Arty: The Poetic for Gender Transition.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
This dissertation argues that art practices I refer to as “poetic,” which include but are not specific to poetry itself, can do more than simply report or communicate the fact of gender transition but actually make it possible. By “poetic” I mean the capacities of art and language to be affective, provisional, and meaningful rather than stable, narrative, or practical; and by “transition” I refer to the set of processes that one might undertake to shift their own position within the systems of sex and gender and the ways others respond to them in that system. Taking these two categories together responds to the persistent valuation of not only autobiographical but narrative, realist accounts of trans people’s lives—accounts which are often used to conflate transition with some ontological quality of “being trans.” Thinking about the work of the “poetic”—including in these narrative accounts—unhooks transition from chrononormative temporalities and asserts writing and making as processes of invention, discovery, and embodiment rather than as belated reporting. While this last idea about invention is not unique to this dissertation, it is this dissertation’s contention that accounts of the relationship between gender and language too often do not start from this place, dooming them never to reach it. Situating these capabilities as a major function of
writing and making in turn renders a more accurate account of readerly experience of what it means to be inspired by and live with these works. The introduction of this study makes this argument at greater length, and in relation to debates about the importance of the truth value in trans autobiography in the mid-twentieth century, while the chapters that follow take up sculpture, private journal writings, autotheory, lyric poetry, and pedagogy as sites for taking even more seriously than we have previously the ability of creative making to produce a difference in people’s lives—and for that difference to be, potentially, gender transition. In doing so, this dissertation argues that not only “being trans” but the specific processes of transition themselves are good, valuable, “beautiful, arty” things to do.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
| Creators | Email | Pitt Username | ORCID  |
|---|
| Corfman, Samuel Brook | sbc33@pitt.edu | sbc33 | |
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| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
7 June 2024 |
| Approval Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
30 July 2024 |
| Access Restriction: |
2 year -- Restrict access to University of Pittsburgh for a period of 2 years. |
| Number of Pages: |
250 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > English |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
trans studies; gender studies; poetics; rhetoric & composition; pedagogy; poetry; autotheory; Greer Lankton; visual art; installation art; transgender |
| Date Deposited: |
27 Aug 2024 13:21 |
| Last Modified: |
27 Aug 2024 13:21 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/46784 |
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