Abstract
Writing Transgender: Speculative and Real contrasts narratives that employ genre-specific constructs of transgender with transgender writers' genre-bending literary production. I argue that emerging transgender narratives transform genres, and demonstrate that as the literary presence of transgender expands, it rewrites both the social terms and the narrative articulations of experiencing gender and understanding genre. Beginning with science fiction, I use Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and a selection of subsequent texts to discuss the creation and disintegration of a speculative fiction trope that employs racialized versions of the nonbinary figure to trouble the “borders” of the human. I then put the personal narrative in Paul Preciado's "body essay," Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, in conversation with "biopolitical nonfictions," specifically medical and legal texts that perpetuate a narrative of “fixed” binary trans subjectivity. I argue that Preciado’s performative violations of medical and legal procedures, and his satire of the generic conventions of autobiography, exemplify transgender personal narrative operating as a public site of resistance. I conclude with a study of Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, using Rosenberg’s adaptation of the historical novel to argue that transgender literature is often immediately aware of and responsive to the means of its production and reception, that it navigates and repurposes the genres, discourses, and texts that, historically, have been invested in representing transgender. Bringing together texts that interrogate gender and genre through each other, this dissertation offers an untold literary history of the breaking and remaking of genres through the emergence of new narratives of trans subjectivity.