Michael Barry, "Showtime: Queer Archival Formation and Sexual Labor in Sirena Selena (Vestida de Pena)"
Mayra Santos-Febres’s acclaimed contribution to the growing archive of trans Caribbean literature: Sirena Selena (Vestida de Pena), occupies a vexed position in literary criticism, while often being subsumed into arguments endemic to queer theory regarding the subversive potential of trans characters. This subsumption, exemplified by a critical preoccupation with the novel’s use of the terms “real woman” and “real lady,” not only results in an oversaturated, hegemonic strain of reading, but analyses that are fundamentally complicit in the (re)concretization of monolithic gender conceptions through a necessary investment in the fabrication of “real” genders. Furthermore, contentions that arise from these narrow, “tragic misreadings” routinely ignore the specific social contexts of Caribbean translocality, a critical absence that evokes Viviane Namaste’s critique of Judith Butler (published in 2000, the same year as Sirena Selena). As a consequence of this limited theorization, the narrative’s environment of constant crisis for trans subjects, characterized by state-sanctioned police violence, sexual exploitation, and class conflict, is frequently written about obliquely, or not at all. Attempts to wrest meaning from Santos-Febres’s trans characters, in pursuit of a uniform narrative of subversion, ultimately negate, then overwrite, how those characters narrate their survival within and against dominant social structures.
This paper reconceptualizes Sirena Selena’s drag performances, alongside moments of intercharacter gossip, as labors of queer archival formation, rather than individualized moments of supposedly verifiable subversion. Through this theoretical reorientation, off-stage dialogue and enacted performance work reciprocally to vocalize the resistant existence of distinctly Caribbean trans subjects, while also actively naming queer predecessors and a present queer translocality. In doing so, Santos-Febres’s novel explores the temporo-spatial potentialities of a queer archive without abandoning the lived realities of the characters’ present, violent crisis.
Caylee Weintraub, "Climate Change, Community, and Coral in Ada Patterson’s “Broken from the Colony”"
In an interview, Ada M. Patterson, a semifinalist in Grist’s “Imagine 2200” climate contest, described the driving premise of her short story, “Broken from the Colony”: “I’m trying to imagine what comes after the grief. Once the island is lost, then what?... I wanted to approach it in a way that honored the truth of what’s probably going to happen while thinking that there could still be life afterwards, even if it’s not human life.” Asked to envision the year 2200 through climate fiction, or “cli fi,” an emerging subgenre of work that seeks to envision new kinds of futures in the wake of anthropogenic climate change, “Broken from the Colony” envisions an alternate reality wherein the entirety of Barbados, Patterson’s home island, has been drowned by Hurricane Dorian. The only people who survive are Black trans girls who have taken estrogen, which enables them to breathe underwater. They emerge at the end of the story as a novel species of human-coral hybrids who will ultimately join together to form a coral reef and remake the drowned Barbados anew. Patterson’s use of the coral reef to represent a political imaginary is not entirely novel; it is grounded in a long legacy of writers—particularly Black writers—who have utilized the metaphorical capacities of coral communities to articulate progressive visions of community. I historicize Patterson, herself a Black trans woman, as part of a long literary history of Black writers who turn to coral as a way to envision new kinds communities that are forged through kin relationships and exist as alternatives to violent colonial, heteronormative societies. By engaging the material and metaphorical capacities of coral reefs, Patterson depicts a new kind of interspecies collective polity that is grounded in the idea of a dynamic, knotted unity that is continually in the process of becoming, and, therefore, always has the potential for transformation.
