Kontakt
The Literary Reworking of Cultural Tropes in Contemporary North American Transgender Fiction
This dissertation project examines how harmful tropes about transgender people within North American culture are renegotiated in contemporary trans fiction. This question opens up two discussions that connect to recent broader conversations within literary studies: On the one hand, a discussion on genre theory that asks how contemporary trans fiction grapples with the problematic literary tradition of the transgender memoir; on the other, a discussion on affect, worldmaking, and reception aesthetics that asks which textual strategies implicate a reparative reading of trans fiction, how trans fiction engages in queer/trans worldmaking, and how trans fiction potentially creates an affect of belonging for trans readerships.
The project will highlight tropes such as the “wrong body” narrative which rests on the cisnormative medicalization and pathologization of transgender identity; the construction of transitioning as a temporally enclosed, linear process; the imagination of trans gender identities and gender-variant expressions as monstrous; and the construction and perception of trans people as liars, deceivers, and imposters. The literary analyses explore how issues around trans identity and their intersections with the examined tropes are represented in fiction, but especially how works employ specific strategies on the levels of plot, narration, language, style, form, and genre in order to (1) effectively counter and deconstruct transphobic tropes and their resulting discursive effects, and thereby perhaps repair the damage done to self-conceptualizations of trans communities by equipping readers with critical lenses of reading, and (2) to create an affect of belonging and a literary space of home for trans readerships in order to counter the othering and isolating effects of the discussed tropes and discourses.