Dr Alex Brostoff: "The Task of the Trans Translator: Paradoxes of Visibility, Autotheories of Opacity"

An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Alex Brostoff (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025)

The Task of the Trans Translator: Paradoxes of Visibility, Autotheories of Opacity

What is the task of the trans translator? How have paradoxes of visibility bound translation and transgender studies in uncanny inversions of each other? And what might autotheoretical methodologies contribute to decolonizing the transgender imaginary in translation? This talk probes how form—from the grammatical to the material and from the social to the structural—shapes and is shaped by the ways in which trans and translation interface with regimes of readability. It argues that the task of the trans translator is to renew trans life with an opacity that thwarts traps of visibility while elucidating the anti-colonial interventions and intertextual solidarities of translation itself. To navigate these counter currents is to surface what I call, following Édouard Glissant, a trans poetics of relation.