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The Promise of Repair: Trans Rage and the Limits of Feminist Coalition

This essay theorizes the work of rage at the interface of trans and feminist theories and movements. The juncture of trans and feminist movements is in need of continuing attention given the contemporary resurgence of trans-exclusionary forms of feminist thought and praxis and the ongoing phenomenon of a form of feminist trans tolerance that often falls short of substantive inclusion. I theorize the intersection of trans and feminist movements as a site of affective dissonance and failed care by exploring the multivalent operations of rage within attempts at trans-feminist coalitional politics. I examine how rage can be both world building and world destroying for subjects and collectives, how rage is or isn’t made legible, how (il)legibility informs both whose rage matters and what rage is able to do, and how rage becomes involuted as a form of political depression when the spaces that are meant to empathically hold and witness the range of negative affects associated with oppression fail to do so. Ultimately, the essay is animated by one central question: What roles does rage play in the difficult (and imperative) cultivation of transfeminist coalitions?