"Reading After the Clinic: Trans Pulp and the Generic Life of Gender," a Lecture by Jo Giardini

In this paper I examine the wide variety of popular literatures about transition published after the opening of the first public-facing ‘Gender Identity Clinics’ in the late 1960s. Much of this work appeared in cheap mass-market paperback editions, paralleling the period’s gay and lesbian pulp fiction. While gay and lesbian pulp, however, was typically oriented towards a queer audience, trans pulp’s reception was much more fractured—a fact reflected by the wide variety of generic forms it was published under, including pornography, science fiction, autobiography, satire, and pseudoscientific reportage. From Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge to Vivian Le Man’s Take My Tool, these works provide an unsettlingly wide portrait of the consumption of trans identity, in contrast to the contemporaneous norms of clinical case studies, which presume a sharply delimited trans subject. Reading across texts, I ask how the shifting social reproduction of gender was connected to the social institution of genre, and examine how influential genre theorists (including Fredric Jameson, Lauren Berlant, and Theodore Martin) might be revisited to better understand the generic life of gender.

Jo Giardini is an assistant professor in the department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College. Their research focuses on twentieth-century poetics, communalist and separatist movements, literary genre, and the intersection of political economy, racial capitalism, and the history of sexuality. They received their PhD in 2022 from Johns Hopkins University, with a dissertation titled Separations: Communalist and Alter-Urban Imaginaries in 1970s American Literature. While at Johns Hopkins, they helped found the Trans Histories Lab in the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center, and organized numerous lecture series, poetry readings, and film screenings celebrating queer and trans cultural production. They are currently working on a new book project Generic Operations: Gender Identity from Clinic to Culture, a critical history of the clinical conception of gender identity and gender transition, and how this clinical work was absorbed into popular culture and contested by trans writers and activists.Their writing appears, or is forthcoming, in TSQ, Text Zur Kunst, Tripwire, and ASAP, among other venues.

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