Ulysses Constance Bougie (he/they) is a writer and visual artist with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the University of Missouri. He is currently a graduate instructor at Illinois State University with focuses in asexual and aromantic studies, composition studies, and multimodal/neuro/queer rhetorics.

On The Men I Wish I Was

“There are very few pieces of media that encapsulate how it feels to be transgender. I don’t think until this moment I found a piece that genuinely mirrors my view of my gender, my sexuality, my worldview as much as this play does. What Bougie does in 29 pages is absolutely incredible. If I could make this required reading in every queer theatre course, I would.”

–Cesario Tirado-Ortiz

“Ulysses Constance Bougie writes remarkably erotic prose poetry about, often at least, asexuality and aromanticism. And where sometimes their work can revel in sound–baroque and rapturous–it can then turn toward meditations on the everyday with a language that at times can border on the casual, like comic book prose marked by a wry self-awareness. But there is also an abiding meditative dimension in Ulysses’s work, as if their work is always questioning what the fuck is going on. Paradoxically, this lends their work a curiously comforting quality.

“But here also sometimes is a semi-semantic rhyming that seems to encourage the reader to be at ease in who and what they are, an odd and constant questioning and rephrasing and reconsidering as to what a thing is, a relationship is, a date is, a person is, a dress, a breast is.

“And just as the foregoing pushes sense away and risks a cloying alliteration, Ulysses’s work can then turn on a dime and speak with a clear poignancy that somehow just leaves you happier for reading their work. There is a comfort found in reading Ulysses’s work, in their curious and iterative insistence that even though something is not quite right, it’s fine that way. It’s not that surface isn’t to be trusted. Rather, it’s that it’s all surface–and you can trust that. And just let that be its own balm. I’m sure Ulysses would find the following assertion preposterous: but there is a deep wisdom in their work.”

–Gabriel Gudding, author of Literature for Nonhumans and Rhode Island Notebook

Recent + Upcoming Publications

[3 illustrations]. Grassroots Writing Research Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 2023.

Postcard. HORNS, no. 3, Bullshit Lit, 2023.

With S. Cavar (upcoming). “Girltalk: Reflections on Testosterone, A/sexuality, and Libido.” Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, 2nd ed., edited by K. J. Cerankowski and Megan Milks.

With S. Cavar (upcoming). “port-man-toes: the aroace-queercrip-transmad-neuroqueer erotics of crip collaboration.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.