Trans people have always known that our fight for liberation benefits everyone; that our main issues — bodily autonomy, freedom from state surveillance, to name just a couple— should be a priority for all. With Trans Futures season two, we sought to translate this truth into conversations that not only reflect the universal relevance of our struggle, but also highlight the organizers, actors, politicians, and authors, leading us toward a freer, more vibrant world. Watch the full series here.
The terms “horror” and “healing” are rarely used in tandem. But for authors Carmen Maria Machado and Gretchen Felker-Martin, there’s a deep and illuminating connection between the genre and the experience. “It’s a really frightening time to be queer in America,” Felker-Martin, author of the 2022 novel Manhunt, tells Them. “When we’re suffering, we have a primal urge to understand why — and to inject some meaning into the situation; horror gives us an outlet where we can process those feelings.”
For many readers, Felker-Martin’s debut novel embodied exactly such an outlet. Within the Massachusetts-based writer’s vision of a gendered apocalypse, where a virus transforms anyone with enough testosterone into a cannibalistic beast and TERFs are not just Twitter warriors, but members of actual murderous militias, trans people continue to survive, no matter the circumstances. As the critic Christ wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Manhunt shows that trans futures, no matter how many of us are killed, will continue to smash themselves out into reality even as the world ends.”
If horror offers Felker-Martin an outlet for understanding, Maria Machado explains the appeal of the genre in more visceral terms. “I was a deeply anxious child, and I was so drawn to horror novels and movies that my parents would take them away,” she tells Them. Far from a contradiction, the Her Body and Other Parties author explains that the jolt of fear helped to “change [her] temperature,” adding, “anxiety can freeze you. Horror can affect that paralysis.”
For Trans Futures 2023, Gretchen Felker-Martin and Carmen Maria Machado came together for a discussion of horror’s healing potential, the dangers of incuriosity, and the necessity of interrupting the typical beats of queer and trans representation.
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