Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:35:31.716Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

28 - Whiteness and Trans Genre, Whiteness as Trans Genre

from Race and the Politics of Queer and Trans Representation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2024

Benjamin Kahan
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
Get access

Summary

What makes a text generically trans? A central plank of the term ‘transgender’ and prefixial ‘trans’ was a genre shift. After the modernist and transsexual fixation on autobiography and medical case studies, trans writing was meant to play on a far more open semiotic field. Whether that transformation took place, however, is a matter of debate. If ‘trans’ as the denotive for a genre of writing remains vague and not very well distinguished from its cousin ‘queer,’ and so trans still generates few genres beyond the first person, perhaps the issue is not the narratological genealogy of trans, but an unspoken racial haunting of the very same, a presence that is unspoken even as it is explicitly conjured and exorcised. This chapter investigates three recent works of trans genre—Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, and T. Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through—to propose an undisclosed inter-racial relation that trans conventionally serves to cover over. The foundational relation of trans genre may prove to be the white trans author to the trans woman of color, she who occupies the text through either absence or idealization.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×