What is the task of the trans translator? How have paradoxes of visibility bound translation and trans 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 Glissant, a trans poetics of relation.

Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College and a 2025 Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Edinburgh. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they are currently completing their first book, Unruly Relations: A Critical Reframing of Autotheory (Columbia University Press, under advance contract), which recasts autotheory’s transnational and transdisciplinary place in the political history of trans and queer literature of the Américas. They are the co-editor of two volumes: Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, under advance contract), as well as the co-translator of Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak’s Life Is Not Useful (Polity Press, 2023) and Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024). Their scholarship and translations have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Critical Times, Synthesis, Dibur, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.

WINTER 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Winter 2025 Series.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.