The trans*poetics symposium brings together authors and artists whose radical thinking and writing strive for collective forms of expression and political agency and as such are always an open invitation and obligation at once—an invitation to renew and transform allegedly established identifications and the imperative of solidarity. In this endeavor, an intentional mixture of theoretical reflection and artistic practice takes on a central role. The interplay between theory and art opens up new perspectives and thought processes that transgress disciplinary boundaries while enabling new forms of knowledge production and expression. The theoretical and the poetic—targeted forces that can forge alliances: the symposium trans*poetics aims to discuss and implement these processes in a vibrant range of lectures, performances, and talks.

Program on Friday, October 17, 2025

10 am
Welcome

10.10 am
Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi aka crazinisT artisT
Performance as Radical Resistance

Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT) will share her practice as a frontline advocate for queer rights in Ghana and internationally. She will discuss her work as a multidisciplinary artivist, artvangelist, curator, mentor, and philanthropist. Her radical performances consistently demonstrate genuine empathy, compassion, and solidarity, inviting participants, witnesses, and bystanders to contemplate the global rise of fascist movements and challenge anti-queer forces that condemn LGBTQIA+ individuals both within and outside Ghana. As the founder and director of perfocraZe International Artist Residency (pIAR), Our Railway Cinema Gallery (ORCG), and crazinisT artisT studiO (TTO), which are currently at risk due to the proposed anti-LGBTQIA+ bill in Ghana, Va-Bene will also detail the genesis of her advocacy. This shift from painting to performance involved practically removing her body from the canvas and onto the streets of Ghana as an act of resistance and a decolonial process. Her presentation will unveil the persecution of the LGBTQIA+ community in Ghana and the draconian anti-LGBTQIA+ bill that seeks to criminalize and imprison queer people, allies, parents, landlords, sympathizers, and others.

10.45 am
Alison Rumfitt
WORKINPROGRESS

Alison Rumfitt reads from her work-in-progress literary fiction(?) novel, gives context for its development, and talks about some of the issues that come up when constantly trying to meet the contemporary moment.

11.45 am
Francis Whorrall-Campbell
IT’S SO HARD TO BE A SAINT WHEN YOU’RE JUST A BOY IN THE CITY

A reading of Francis’s serialized novel-in-progress, The Revolution Will Not Have Been Downloaded, will open onto thoughts about the relationship between trans life and literary form. Essentially an inverted travel narrative, TRWNHBD raises questions about how literary time and space phenomenalize change and continuity in accounts of gender transition. The colonial history of this genre is invoked by TRWNHBD’s central “plot hole”—a literal sinkhole in Barbados code-named “Metabolic Rift”—the existence of which clears the way for a critique of three genres extracted from (or given by) trans writers: autofiction, allegory, and realism.

12.30 pm
Break

2 pm
Juliana Gleeson
Hermaphrodite Logic Dissolves Into Poems: Two Versions of ‘Intersex’ (2015)

This reading will address two poems with a shared title (Intersex) and year of publication (2015) by Juliana Huxtable and Aaron Apps. I will explain why they close my shorter history of the intersex movement Hermaphrodite Logic (published this summer) Despite the formal contrasts of the two works (Huxtable’s version a prophetic angelic vision, App’s memoir of himself as wretched folk devil), I make a case for them forming a commensurate whole, speaking to the eruption of self-consciousness let loose by later twentieth century counterculture from the 1990s through to 2025. These forms are therefore both clashing and harmonious (as their names suggest). As I put it: “In a few words, Intersex slides through the history of hermaphrodites: from divine forms in merger to the disintegration of expert reason (clerical, juridical, clinical).” While in App’s version: “Intersex reveals to us the monstrous process by which Aaron finds himself human.”

3 pm
Closing panel

With Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi aka crazinisT artisT, Basyma Saad, D Mortimer, and Maxi Wallenhorst
Moderated by Francis Ruyter and Nanna Heidenreich