Torrey Peters' "Stag Dance"

Eric Newman speaks with Torrey Peters about her new story collection, Stag Dance, which spans genre, time, and place to explore the shifting sands of gender, sex, desire, and identity. From a post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is trans to a pirate logging camp in the early 1900s where desire and gender explode in surprising ways, the stories in Stag Dance plumb the murky and often ugly feelings that contradict the “good politics” narrative of the transgender experience. Eric and Torrey discuss how our desires and identities often remain unintelligible to us, how the materialist force of capitalism shapes those desires and our relationships with others, and what history might tell us about today’s unprecedented assault on trans rights and lives.