Play Girl

Abstract

Play Girl investigates the aesthetics of trans becoming through a lyric voice that is simultaneously theatrical, fragmented, and searching. Across its two movements, the collection charts a gendered metamorphosis that resists linearity or fixed resolution, instead unfolding through performance, fantasy, and dissociation. The manuscript constructs and deconstructs the figure of the "girl" as scene, as echo, as site of play. The manuscript's speakers encounter the erotic, familial, and diagnostic frames that contour gender transition. These poems grapple with beauty, disgust, longing, and inheritance, often refracted through the figure of the mother or the implied spectator. The work navigates moments of exposure and self-mythology, deploying persona, apostrophe, and dark humor to resist legibility and containment. Poems shift registers rapidly—from sacred to grotesque, confessional to clinical—mirroring the porousness of trans embodiment and perception. Throughout Play Girl, form functions as both costume and skin. The collection blends fractured lyric sequences, prose blocks, and syntactically disobedient stanzas to evoke a speaker in flux—always returning, but never quite whole. Influenced by the work of writers such as Karyna McGlynn, Diane Seuss, Ross Gay, and Diane Cook, this thesis proposes a poetics of oscillation: between interiority and spectacle, softness and artifice, survival and play.