Abstract
It would not be going too far to say that contemporary trans subjects are trapped in the confessional. In order to access the medical and legal tools of transition, trans people are required to enact a ritualistic repetition of ‘their journey’ that amounts to a secularized form of religious confession. This essay turns to Renaissance lyric for another mode of trans confession, one that frustrates the basic purposes of feeding transgender affect into what Foucault calls an ‘endless mill of speech.’ Focusing on John Donne’s purposefully obscure engagements with religion and transition in ‘The Funerall,’ this essay argues that metaphysical poetry offers a form of trans confession that does not terminate in the medicalized techniques of social control.
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 195–203.https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00172-x
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Gordon, C. (2022). The sign you must not touch: Lyric obscurity and trans confession . In: Arvas, A., McCannon, A., Trujillo, K. (eds) Critical Confessions Now. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18508-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18508-3_5
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