Trish Salah’s Wanting in Arabic practises what I call an écriture au trans-féminine. Salah’s poetry is simultaneously performative and constative, recognizing both the social construction of gender and the impulse to ground notions of womanhood in the material specificity of the female body. This article traces a continuum between French feminist écriture féminine, québécoise/Canadian écriture au féminin, and Salah’s oeuvre. Engaging with debates critical to feminist and transgender revisions of psychoanalysis and sexual (in)difference, Salah’s exuberant and irreverent writing deconstructs fundamental master narratives and myths of origin, locating transsexual/transgender realities at the very roots of Western culture.
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