Please join the WGSI in congratulating Valley Weadick who successfully defended their doctoral dissertation – “Trapped in the Wrong World: Transgender and Paranormal Phenomena”
Valley’s committee consisted of supervisor Dina Georgis and committee members T.L. Cowan (iSchool) and Patricia Salah (Queen’s U).
Internal Examiner: SA Smythe (iSchool)
External Examiner: Eliza Steinbock (Maastricht University)
Congratulations, Dr. Weadick!
Trapped in the Wrong World: Transgender and Paranormal Phenomena
If the sex/gender binary and biological essentialism constitute everyday reality, then trans people are placed in a dubious relationship to reality itself. In a world that insists that traversing sex/gender boundaries is impossible and unreal, trans people feel out and engage in practices that defy possibility. Beginning with the associations tied between transsexuality and psychosis, my dissertation explores the overlaps between otherworldly beliefs, madness, and transness. How do trans people negotiate the disjuncture between our lived practices and a reality that denies our very existence? What strategies do trans people use to negotiate the often-ineffable feelings of wrongness (wrong body, wrong sex, wrong world, etc.) that arise from “impossible” desires?
If “biological reality” asserts that trans people and our identifications are not real, delusional, fantasy, or simply wrong, I explore how the unreal, paranormal, supernatural, and otherworldly offer creative practices to express the internal, felt sense of being trans; to describe the world’s hostility towards trans existence; and to cultivate survival and healing from those hostilities. While the source material for this project is often imaginative, speculative, and fictional, I continually put pressure on the line between the figurative and the literal, refusing to subscribe unempirical—transgender and paranormal—phenomena to the realm of the unreal. Instead, the unreal, including ghosts and hauntings, spirits and deities, and astral projection, become practices that are integral to desire, identification, transition, and the materiality of everyday life.