Tokyo Modernism Research Seminar (Professor Benjamin Kahan Special Lecture)

Tokyo Modernism Research Seminar (Professor Benjamin Kahan Special Lecture)

“Too many clarities superimposed”: Marianne Moore’s Trans Poetics and the Gender of Meter

Professor Benjamin Kahan (Louisiana State University)

Friday, April 17, 2026, 17:00-18:30 [UTC+9]

2026年4月17日（金）17:00-18:30

場所　東京大学駒場キャンパス18号館4階コラボレーションルーム2（対面のみ）

 

Abstract:

This talk strives to hold co-present the archives of female and lesbian modernism on the one hand, and trans modernism on the other without conceiving of them as a binarized choice. Taking up Marianne Moore’s final and most biographical volume, Tell Me, Tell Me (1966) in relation to her use of male pronouns and male embodiment, this talk theorizes Moore’s trans poetics. It argues that Moore employs two main trans techniques to theorize her trans poetics. Firstly, I contend that Moore’s employs syllabics and Skeltonics to parry and sidestep the binarized and gendered logics that characterize accentual-syllabic forms, particularly the way that accentual-syllabic poems’s lines and rhymes are characterized as either “masculine” or “feminine.” Secondly, I argue that Moore’s expansive ontological imaginary (frequently associated with her self-depiction in relation to armored and other animals) is mutually constitutive of her trans poetics. More specifically, I argue that Tell Me, Tell Me features Moore sotto voce transforming herself into a number of objects (clocks, statues, coins, etc) with faces, employing such objecthood to unthread the mandate to stipulate sexed being.

 

Professor Benjamin Kahan is the Herbert Huey McElveen Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and a number of other institutions. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago, 2019). His new monograph Sexual Aim and Its Misses is under contract with Chicago. He is also the editor of The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature (Cambridge, 2024), Heinrich Kaan’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality (Cornell, 2016), and a co-editor of Theory Q, a book series from Duke University Press.

 

This lecture will be held in person only.

この講演会は対面のみでの実施となります。事前登録は不要です。

問い合わせ先: kshin☆g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp（東京大学・秦邦生）［☆部分を@で置き換えてください］