Farris warns us, “These are not stories one can hand to another and afterward ask: did your soul move like the peristalsis inside your gut?” Instead of capitalizing on the satisfying and familiar conventions of narrative, she uses the unclassifiable text, the monstrous text, and unruly prose to explore the ways language, as we know it, limits what is possible in our thinking about sexuality. For Farris, genre – with its established conventions, its repertoire of restrictions – and gender are inexorably linked. Indeed, she shows us that our most familiar categories of identity are embedded within the very texture of language itself. She reveals form, genre, and even grammar as the foundation of the social order, that alterity which speaks through us, and at the same time, defines us.

Illustrated by: Lavinia Hanachiuc