Chase Berggrun’s R E D and Transfeminist Erasure:

Uncovering a “Queer Tongue” in Dracula

Abstract

This article examines how the lyric speaker of Chase Berggrun’s poetry collection R E D (2018) composes herself from the multiple narrative voices of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Berggrun uses erasure as both an embodied and a textual practice in order to record the testimony of a survivor of gender-based violence. An experiment in generic and temporal transformation, R E D is best analysed through the lens of trans studies as its author extends queer and feminist readings of Dracula.