Tyler Raso is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Indiana University whose current work reaches toward a collaborative poetics with their childhood selves across time. Thinking with the complications of “the closet” as a portable figure of queer identity, they’re most concerned, at present, with transformation, joy, literal and figurative confinement, and the failures and absences of language. Beginning with their upbringing in an Evangelical, military family, with the ways in which they stole queer time from a straight world, they write and dream toward queerness as prismatic, and a site of belonging. In this, they work through lyric questioning, fragmentary narrative, to, as much as possible, cut against the grain of gender-as-objecthood, to open toward a queer, trans, utopic self/ves-making or world/s-making. This means, their work is primarily interested in rupture, in unlearning.

As their project witnesses and interrogates vocabularies of objecthood, they hope to work with the Kinsey Institute collections to expand into a tender, messy, transformative invocation of queer possibility in the material world. To think with, especially, toys, dolls, puppets as windows into or witnesses of queer discovery. The Kinsey Institute’s selections of theoretical groundings in sexual development in childhood and gender nonconformity will root the exploration, while material centered on primary and imaginative experience of objects (as an expansive category) like Barbie Culture, or William’s Doll, and pulp fiction like The Dollmaker will give shape to the curiosity, how the objects we live with or through contain, invoke, or name desires or intimacies beyond the grasp of language.