In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editors’ Note
  • Victoria Pitts-Taylor and Talia Schaffer

Trans-: Transgender, transnational, transspeciation, translation, transformation. Trans- as connection: shared space and time, transatlantic, transhistorical. Trans- as violation: transgression, transsection. Trans- as both assemblage and dissassemblage, as folded into structures of power as well as a movement of becoming. Most significantly for us, perhaps, trans- as a way of seeing and thinking.

This issue reaches across disciplinary borders, across spatial and temporal planes, moving as well among public and private, academic and personal, mind and body, and troubling those distinctions. In Paisley Currah, Lisa Jean Moore, and Susan Stryker’s moving words, it is “the capillary space of connection and circulation between the macro- and micro-political.” It also stretches from writer to reader, a trans-action necessarily invested with hope for language’s transformative promise.

Trans-, a prefix with its matching suffix forever suspended, is where we locate ourselves, in the act of reaching, questioning any easy placement of the term. Likewise, Hala Kamals’s fascinating account of translating “gender” in Arabic reveals there is no proper match for that word with its heavily coded constellation of meanings. There is also no singularly normative body. Elizabeth Loeb’s wonderful study of the oddly arbitrary somatic models underlying gender law, and Aaron Norton and Ozzie Zehner’s discussion of the bodies that violate medicalized definitions of motherhood, reveal that the medico-juridical norm is as arbitrarily constructed, internally fissured, and profoundly contradictory, as any of the paradigms that challenge it. There is no ideal space, nor one that is easily bounded. From the urban-sprawl wastelands of James Shultis’s prose-poems, to the uncomfortably small towns of Lucas Crawford’s memories, trans-bodies traverse regions and nations: Turkey, Venezuela, Iran, Germany, New York City, generating affiliations that complicate nation and citizenship as well as other categories of identification.

We called this reading experience a trans-action, to emphasize the [End Page 9] extent to which this issue is a call to action, yet the model of a trans-action perhaps suggests too much finality, as if you read the articles and then you’re done. Perhaps the trans- we need is “transference,” the name for the mistake that makes psychoanalysis possible, but in addition the name for a relationship that is also a gift, as in transferring something among us: the readers, writers, and editors.

This issue, Trans-, also represents a transition for this journal. This is our first issue as general editors. Our new team also includes an expanded editorial board, including some exciting younger scholars, our wonderful new administrative associates, Jess Bier, Stacie McCormick, and Zoe Meleo-Erwin, and our new fiction/nonfiction editor, Susan Daitch, who joins our poetry editor, Kathy Ossip. At the Feminist Press, we have relied upon the expertise of Anjoli Roy, our managing editor, and we thank her as we also, sadly, say goodbye, as this is her last issue. We are delighted to be entrusted with this dynamic, exciting, experimental journal, and we look forward to developing upon the work the previous editors, Nancy K. Miller and Cindi Katz, accomplished with such flair. Look for more issues about interdisciplinary, gender and culture, an expanded web presence, a presence in databases like JSTOR and Project MUSE, and a new set of issues on topics like technologies and mothering.

We are proud to inaugurate our editorship with this issue, which we believe represents what Eva Hayward, in her article in this volume “More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves,” calls a “critical enmeshment.” For Hayward, critical enmeshment is “always a verb just as it is also situated and historical.” As in her work, in this issue critical enmeshment “enfolds” language, bodies, art, music, and thought as “lively . . . relatings of others to each other.” The enfoldings throughout this volume, we hope, also offer “prefixial lessons” worth deep consideration.

Victoria Pitts-Taylor Professor of Sociology Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Talia Schaffer Professor of English Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York [End Page 10]

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