TRANS STUDIES

ISBN 978-1-938900-51-8
Release Date: Winter 2025
Perfect-bound, 78 pages, 5.3″x7″
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SYNOPSIS

Trans Studies is a body of observations, reflections, and vignettes in search of a story that might could be a person. Odelle eyeballs pop culture, gender discourse, and her bad habit of giving boys chances with sharp wit and wicked humor. A memoir in drag, Trans Studies reaches for community and the threads of theory she needs to spin a cute dress and survive. “Is anything like a life on the other side?” Odelle asks and writes shamelessly into the trans femme desire to find out.

With Trans Studies, Crystal Odelle has created a deeply intimate, razor sharp, and often laugh-out-loud tapestry of gender and sexuality. Odelle takes us from the community of a trans femme meetup group, to intrusive thoughts that enter her mind on dates, to Audre Lorde, The Matrix, and beyond, inviting readers to witness all the contours of her nuanced story, as well as to interrogate their own. I couldn’t get enough of her voice, which traverses from playful, tender, and biting with elegance and wit. Trans Studies leans into the complicated messiness of being human. Odelle is a writer to watch.

—Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual

What is the relationship between trans studies and trans life? Between our endless (generative, inane) theorizing about Gender (and our genders) and the erotic, spiritual, psychic work of becoming, of taking up an other form? ‘Is anything like a life on the other side?’ Certainly, these questions cannot be answered with any finality, but Crystal Odelle has given them a thorough, playful, and deadly serious working over. Irreverent and sharp, searching and tender, riotous and resigned, Odelle’s Trans Studies emerges adjacent to (literally, in the office of) Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and moves brilliantly, ambivalently through the maddening discourses that saturate trans feminine experience toward something like a life.

—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch and The Terrible We

Intimate, cutting with both pleasure and ache. Odelle’s writing in Trans Studies reveals the tautologies of gender, the ephemerality of identity, the bright joys and jagged glass edges of trans femme lesbian life. Reading her poetry feels like being in community.

—micha cárdenas, artist and author of Atoms Never Touch and Poetic Operations

Author of Trans Studies and chapbooks editor at Newfound, Crystal Odelle (they / she) is a storyteller of trans / polyamorous / whore praxis, writing & revising into the desire for something like a life. Their stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Split Lip, Apogee, manywor(l)ds, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Lambda Literary fellow and Tin House Scholar, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in Permanent Record: Poetics Toward the Archive (Nightboat Books) and We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction (Neon Hemlock Press). She writes RPGs at Feverdream Games and serves as academic and administrative coordinator for the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Book design by David Wojciechowski.