Neutrøis
- Syd Zolf
- Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Department of English, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, School of Arts & Sciences, The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design
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Independent Creative Production Grant
Syd Zolf will complete their sixth book of poetry, Neutrøis, a project that marks a major new turn towards a trans poetics of possibility. The book’s title is a term for a nonbinary trans person who refuses gender and may choose to have surgery and take hormones to remove gender markers from their body. As Neutrøis explores notions of “third,” nonbinary gender, the book’s poetic assemblages will enact third-or-more spaces where subjects are always trans-forming, refusing the labels pinned on them. Poems will draw on multiple texts, including personal letters and medical documents, sexological case studies on the “female transsexual,” psychometric tests to determine the level of masculinity in a person, and philosophical writing on the “neutral” third person. Voices questioning authoritarian apparatuses will permeate the book, as it enacts a monstrous queer/trans assemblage of Neutrøis‘s complex, life-affirming speech.