Sleight of Hand

Date of Graduation

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

Howell, Rebecca G.

Committee Member

Davis, Geffrey M.

Second Committee Member

Jensen, Toni L.

Keywords

prose; poetry; sexual assualt; fiction

Abstract

Sexual assault disproportionately effects queer and trans people, many of whom will suffer it more than once. As a way to describe the impact of that on this individual and their trans community, I've taken an all-sides approach, using techniques from memoir, poetic tradition, translation, and linguistic philosophy. This should be a disorienting experience for a reader, but not an ungrounded one. Structurally, I've paired prose with poetry in sequence to give some stability, and broken this sequence into sections. The formal inventiveness is explicitly addressed throughout to make the thinking clearer and to disrupt a reader's sense of immersion at times. In doing so, this text demands that a reader participate in creating meaning from it and place that meaning in context, in the world outside the book. Framing the text variously as a stage performance, as a magic trick, as a translation, as a metaphor, works to place the reader in explicit and chaotic relation to the instability of language with respect to sexual assault. The text initially explores themes like prey animals, early sexual experiences, embodied trauma, and etymology, then moves to formal translations, historical reviews of sex and trauma studies, and contemporary media in which rape appears. Throughout these first two sections, characters begin to appear in bits and pieces, people from my community who were involved, who were my friends, my assailants, my loved ones. Finally, the text ends in a more linear narrative around the changing relationships in my trans community and what happened after I was assaulted, how language held a possible line of flight out of the violent ways we'd been entangled. A sort of coda charges the reader with the task of radically altering their own relationships, communities, and teachings to enact on the world what I hope I have enacted in my own life and in this book, and ends on a poem.

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