Nordmarken's Poetic Essay Gets Published

Sonny Norkmarken UMass Amherst Sociology

Doctoral candidate Sonny Nordmarken’s poetic essay, “Transfiguring desire: Divining the origin" of species is published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies. The piece is co-authored by Samuel Ace.

The essay combines autoethnographic and poetic methods/genres to examine intimate and social experiences that the authors have had as two transmasculine queers with complex sexual and gender histories in an intergenerational relationship. If queerness/transness is a “species,” the title, playing on Darwin, promises an answer to oft-asked problematic questions of queer/trans origins. Refusing to address this question, the authors instead turn Darwin on himself and examine intimate moments in their lives to show how they have experienced the constant formation and personal evolution of desire and identity.

August 29, 2017