Transnarratives

Recently, "trans" has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. As a prefix, "trans" can attach itself to other words to express or describe movement and change, as it does in the terms "transnational" or "transmedia." Trans is also an adjective when it is part of a word that signifies an identity or expression. Trans has worked as an adjective to destabilize established ideas about gender as it makes new senses of what gender can mean for trans people. Much of the study of life writing is about the study of identity and the possibilities for lives that stories of identity make possible. In that spirit, Trans Narratives: trans, transmedia, transnational represents an opportunity for critical work about life writing by trans people to be featured, as it seeks to interrogate the idea of trans in multiple registers, bringing a prefix to the center of the current field of life-writing studies. It aims to understand through life writing and its theory what trans means when we talk about identities and bodies, and to understand better what the critical terms transmedia and transnational can mean for the field of life writing. The Chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Filling a gap in literature and fulfilling the need for trans-focused work, TransNarratives is an interdisciplinary collection featuring narratives of transgender experiences, providing a sourcebook of a range of trans perspectives, writing styles, and trans methodological fields of applicability. The works included transcend disciplinary boundaries in the pursuit of academic knowledge and creativity, actively deconstructing binaries wherever they begin to appear, whether with regard to gender, race, ability, or sexuality, or to the binary divisions that can sometimes separate academic and creative production. Calling attention to transgender writers, this unique and timely text showcases a wide variety of material, including scholarship from multi- and interdisciplinary transgender perspectives, poetry and fiction that foregrounds trans experience, and first-person transgender narratives. The essays, poems, and stories cover a range of topics relevant to transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary experiences, across time, geographic location, and cultures. An important addition to the field, this groundbreaking text will serve as an essential collection of works for students and researchers in transgender studies, queer studies, and gender studies. FEATURES - Provides accessible, thematically wide-ranging, and stylistically diverse writings, including scholarship from multi- and interdisciplinary transgender perspectives - Includes multi-generational perspectives and non-able-bodied subjectivities - Uniquely formatted to support a dialogue between creative and scholarly work

What does it mean to be young and transgender today? Growing Up Trans shares stories, essays, art and poetry created by trans youth aged 11 to 18. In their own words, the works illustrate the trans experience through childhood, family and daily life, school, their bodies and mental health. Together the collection is a story of the challenges, big and small, of being a young trans person. At the same time, it’s a toolkit for all young people, transgender or not, about what understanding, acceptance and support for the trans community looks like. In addition to the contributed works, there are questions and tips from experts in the field of transgender studies to challenge the reader on how to be a trans ally. Growing Up Trans came out of a series of workshops held in Victoria, British Columbia, to bring together trans youth from across the country with mentors in the community.

The first of its kind, Trans Youth Stories: An Intergenerational Dialogue after the “Trans Tipping Point” is a thematically organized collection of narratives, fiction, nonfiction, letters, poetry, graphics/comics, and visual pieces created by 26 Canadian transgender youth between the ages of 10 and 18. Arranged in sections on childhood, families, bodies, everyday life, schooling, mental health, and acceptance, each section concludes with a response written by a Canadian scholar in transgender studies in conversation with the youth. These responses contextualize the youth pieces with recent scholarship from the field and equip readers with concrete actions for research, activism, and professional practice. Offering a unique and truthful depiction of young trans life and a holistic view of what it might be like to be a young trans person today, this groundbreaking volume will serve as an essential sourcebook for both students and teachers of gender and sexuality studies, trans studies, child and youth studies, counselling, and education. FEATURES: - A unique collection centering the voices of trans youth through firsthand perspectives followed by an extended scholarly response - Includes additional resources and follow-up responses by scholars to help readers contextualize writings of trans youth

GENDER EUPHORIA: a powerful feeling of happiness experienced as a result of moving away from one’s birth-assigned gender. So often the stories shared by trans people about their transition centre on gender dysphoria: a feeling of deep discomfort with their birth-assigned gender, and a powerful catalyst for coming out or transitioning. But for many non-cisgender people, it’s gender euphoria which pushes forward their transition: the joy the first time a parent calls them by their new chosen name, the first time they have the confidence to cut their hair short, the first time they truly embrace themself. In this groundbreaking anthology, nineteen trans, non-binary, agender, gender-fluid and intersex writers share their experiences of gender euphoria: an agender dominatrix being called ‘Daddy’, an Arab trans man getting his first tattoos, a trans woman embracing her inner fighter. What they have in common are their feelings of elation, pride, confidence, freedom and ecstasy as a direct result of coming out as non-cisgender, and how coming to terms with their gender has brought unimaginable joy into their lives.

Queers and trans people in the 1980s and early '90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together take care of each other in the face of state violence.These early HIV care-giving narratives continue to shape how we understand our genders and our disabilities, forming ongoing chosen families for body self-determination.

“This thoughtful academic treatise . . . explores the lives of three famous gender nonconformists in fin-de-siècle Paris.” —Publishers Weekly Before the term “transgender” existed, there were those who experienced their gender in complex ways. Before Trans examines the lives and writings of Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912), three French writers whose gender expression did not conform to nineteenth-century notions of femininity. Dieulafoy fought alongside her husband in the Franco-Prussian War; later she wrote novels about girls becoming boys and enjoyed being photographed in her signature men's suits. Rachilde became famous in the 1880s for her controversial gender-bending novel Monsieur Vénus, published around the same time that she started using a calling card that read “Rachilde, Man of Letters.” Montifaud turned to erotic writings, for which she was repeatedly charged with "offense to public decency"; she wore tailored men's suits and a short haircut and went by masculine pronouns among certain friends. Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud established themselves as fixtures in the literary world of fin-de-siècle Paris at the same time as French writers, scientists, and doctors were becoming fascinated with sexuality and sexual difference. Even so, the concept of gender identity as separate from sexual identity did not yet exist. Before Trans explores these three figures' efforts to articulate a sense of selfhood that did not align with the conventional gender roles of their day. Their personal stories provide vital historical context for our own efforts to understand the nature of gender identity. “A fresh and original take on trans history.” —Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure

Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies. In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay Prosser examines the exchanges between body and narrative that constitute the phenomenon of transsexuality. Showing how transsexuality's somatic transitions are spurred and enabled by the formal transitions of narrative, Prosser uncovers a narrative tradition for transsexual bodies. Sex change is a plot--and thus appropriately transsexuals make for adept and absorbing authors. In reading the transssexual plot through transsexuals' own recounting, Prosser not only gives us a new and more accurate rendition of transsexuality. His book suggests transsexuality, with its extraordinary conjunctions of body and narrative, as an identity story that transitions across the body/language divide that currently stalls poststucturalist thought. The form and approach of Second Skins works to cross other important and parallel divides. In addition to analyzing transsexual textual accounts, the book includes some 30 photographic portraits of transsexuals-- poignant attempts by transsexuals to present themselves unmediated to the world except by the camera. And the author does not shy from exposure himself. Interjecting the personal into his theoretical discussion and close textual work throughout the book, Prosser reads and writes his own body, his purpose in that stylistic crossing to stake out transsexuality--and hence this very book--as his own body's narrative.