Mad Trans Difficulty

Abstract This article argues that the category of difficulty, theorized at the intersection of madness, transness, and femininity, offers critical and aesthetic potential as a site of communicative impasse and critique. Difficulty sticks to certain objects, both cultural and aesthetic objects such as literary texts, as well as people and groups of people perceived to be communicatively intransigent or oppositional, especially in psychiatric contexts. As both a negative social descriptor and an aesthetic radicalism, difficulty contains an important nexus with which to consider the confluence of overlapping experiences of madness and transness, specifically transfemininity, as reflected through the potentialities of literary language. In elaborating a theory of mad transfeminine difficulty, this article reads The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia as formally and thematically initiating difficulty as a baroque elaboration of the socially diagnosed and resistant excessiveness of mad transfemininity.