Interrogating “the end,” becoming “the end”

ABSTRACT

For those of us for whom end times are marked by our arrivals, rhetorical threats of “the end” serve as discursive grounds out of which material experiences are animated. In our current hellscape, queer and trans folks are marked as cultural monstrosities across public and political discourses. Moved by the essays constituting this themed issue, I proffer a response by turning to the ways rhetorics of “the end” and of “end times” are projected onto queer and trans bodies. After all, to be trans and gender expansive is to be and become the end—the end of white supremacy’s clutch on sex, gender, and bodily comportment. This is an ending we demand in full.

KEYWORDS:

• American evangelical rhetorics
• queer rhetorics
• trans rhetorics
• end times
• monstrosity

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Kathleen McConnell and Sohinee Roy for your editorial support, and for your ongoing support more generally. A note to trans and gender expansive kin: Hold lightly, push hard, love deep, and laugh loudly. We only have each other. This essay was written on stolen Akimel O’odham and Piipaash lands on which I am a settler.

Notes

1 Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 25.

2 Christina Pushaw (@ChristinaPushaw), “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill,” Twitter, March 4, 2022, 4:33PM, https://twitter.com/ChristinaPushaw/status/1499890719691051008.

3 For recent iterations of “groomer” discourses being used to vilify QTGE folks, see EJ Dickson, “‘No Mercy for Child Groomers’: Far Right Targets LGBTQ TikToker Preaching Acceptance,” Rolling Stone, April 21, 2022, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/jeffrey-marsh-tiktok-lgbtq-nonbinary-fox-news-harassment-1339526/; John Yang and Dorothy Hastings, “Michigan Sen. Mallory McMorrow Explains Why She Stood up to a Culture War Attack,” PBS, April 22, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/michigan-sen-mallory-mcmorrow-explains-why-stood-up-to-a-culture-war-attack.

4 Aja Romano, “The Right’s Moral Panic over ‘Grooming’ Invokes Age-Old Homophobia,” Vox, April 21, 2022, https://www.vox.com/culture/23025505/leftist-groomers-homophobia-satanic-panic-explained; Steven Blum, “The Alt-Right’s Ongoing Obsession with Demonizing Gay People as Predators,” Vice, November 3, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjgzyq/the-alt-rights-ongoing-obsession-with-demonizing-gay-people-as-predators.

5 Holy See Press Office, “Audience with Participants in the 23rd General Assembly of the Members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, 05.10.2017,” Summary of Bulletin, October 5, 2017, https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2017/10/05/171005d.html.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 SB1138, 55th Leg., 2nd Sess. Amend. title 32, ch. 32, art. 1, § 32–3230 (AZ 2022).

9 SB1165. 55th Leg., 2nd Sess. Amend. title 15, ch. 1, art. 1, § 15-120.02 (AZ 2022).

10 Veronica Ivy and Aryn Conrad, “Including Trans Women Athletes in Competitive Sport: Analyzing the Science, Law, and Principles and Policies of Fairness in Competition,” Philosophical Topics 46, no. 2 (2018): 103–40; Veronica Ivy, “If ‘Ifs’ and ‘Buts’ Were Candy and Nuts: The Failure of Arguments against Trans and Intersex Women’s Full and Equal Inclusion in Women’s Sport,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 7, no. 2 (2021): 1–38.

11 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 6.

12 Ibid. See also Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Bernadette Marie Calafell, Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).

13 Anson Koch-Rein, “Trans-lating the Monster: Transgender Affect and Frankenstein,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 30, no. 1 (2019): 44–61; Jolene Zigarovich, “The Trans Legacy of Frankenstein,” Science Fiction Studies 45, no. 2 (2018): 260–72.