Abstract
In “Transing the Queer (In)human,” the author offers a different kind of intertext for “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” gesturing toward Gayatri Spivak on subaltern speech, Jean-François Lyotard on language games, and Michael Hardt and others on affective labor. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” enacts speaking rather than being spoken to or of, crafting moves in a rigged discursive game, and venting the surplus feelings having to do all that work generates. With the hindsight of twenty years, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” is not only situated in multiple existing language games but a key move to starting a new one—transgender studies. One might wonder, however, about what other possibilities have been left behind. For instance, what transgender studies might it have looked like if this text had been as central to a trans literature as to a trans scholarship?