When traveling across an ocean to undertake a PhD the inevitable question of what to pack arises. It was suggested to only bring the books that were not common and the rest would be there. It is on my arrival that the unsettling fact of what was thought of as common in my research was not available at an arm’s reach. Finding bell hooks “All About Love” on the fiction shelf was perhaps the most unsettling reminder that the writers and theories I surround myself with, were possibly not considered legitimate or at least common. As Laverne Cox mentioned in a public dialogue with bell hooks at The New School in 2014, trans and queer ways of thinking have grown from Black feminism. What does it mean here as a non-binary trans body to build work and research on what is now considered fiction?

Using an epistolary format in reference to Eve Tucks essay “Breaking Up With Deleuze: desire and valuing the irreconcilable” and Julietta Singh’s book “The Breaks”, this presentation is a series of letters written to bell hooks. Weaving narrative and theory to question what legitimacy is and how to survive in an academic space as a non cis hetero patriarchal body: How does one move forward when the foundations stood on are labeled as fictional? When building a method based on desire, how can queer love be tended in the academies of Sweden? How do marginalized bodies navigate Sarah Ahmed’s narratives of precarity while undertaking work and love in a place such as Sweden as Susan Sontag navigates in her writing “Letter From Sweden”? Does teasing apart and disagreeing with portions of “All About Love” support its positioning as fiction in Sweden? Is there a necessity to legitimize “All About Love” as non-fiction before expanding and growing from it?