Trans-crip adjacency: Wu Tsang’s Shape of a Right Statement

Abstract

This article explores how the entanglement of transness and disability can be understood through a performance of adjacency. The author approaches this question through a close reading of the video-performance Shape of a Right Statement (2008) by Asian-American artist Wu Tsang, in which she re-stages the video statement In My Language (2007) by the late autism activist Mel Baggs (1980–2020). Shape of a Right Statement deploys three key formal techniques that help us grasp how trans-crip adjacency is performed: a practice of trans-vocalization that materializes an alienation from hegemonic language, an unsettling of authenticity through the labor of staging and a practice of hosting that opens one’s body to another. In doing so, the entanglement of ‘transgender’ and ‘disability’ operates not through analogy but through adjacency, pointing to the affective labour of inhabitation which complicates the epistemological, political and aesthetic coherency of ‘transgender’ and ‘disability’ in productive ways.