An Asian American trans imaginary unfolds in the writing of Ryka Aoki, Kim Fu, Vivek Shraya, and others who are redefining the trans literary canon’s primary relationship to the life-writing genre and the twentieth-century memoirs by white authors that are among its foundational texts. This literary unfolding is aided by cisgender or non-trans authors, such as Fu, who use cross-gender narratives as vehicles for exploring the intersection of racialization and gendering, or pursuing new approaches to the impasses of our sexual politics. That the racist gaze can confer gender or even misgender people of color is the basis of David L. Eng’s theory of racial castration, according to which Asian Americans are rendered “queer as such.” At a time when differences between “queer” and “trans” are increasingly being elaborated while trans murder rates keep rising, the emergence of Asian American trans literature therefore begs an important question about this intellectual genealogy: Can an Asian Americanist critique that is “queer as such” also be called trans feminist? Drawing on feminist psychoanalytical criticism, this chapter reads Asian American, Hawaiian, and Asian Canadian trans narratives that subvert the disciplining force of gender misrecognition to produce a queer, trans feminist analysis of anti-Asian racism.

Radical transfeminism emerges out of the negation of a future based in limited forms of social inclusion and legal rights, which operate as a mode of encapsulation. Developing Marquis Bey’s and Susan Stryker’s conception of trans, the chapter articulates trans as the anti-static, indeterminate, claim to change that refuses stability, opening the possibility of trans action as a platform for futurity. Radical transfeminism is a materialist ethics rooted in poor and precarious transfeminine bodies, going beyond the limits of trans liberalism and homonormativity and the ascendency of neo-fascist politics across parts of the globe. The logics of neoliberal capitalist social inclusion, visibility and exploitation demand a clear identity; the anti-static trans becomes a refusal of the promise of exploitative inclusion and of the forms of captivity manifest in the borders, prisons, and workplaces that feed capitalist domination. Radical transfeminist futurity embraces emergent relations which hold the potential for transforming material conditions through supporting different lives.

This chapter presents queer and trans popular culture studies through a 2015 plotline on the US soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, in which Maya Avant, a character introduced several years previously, is revealed to be a trans woman. I consider Maya’s story within both the specific context of the soap genre and the supposed phenomenon known as the “transgender tipping point” toward visibility and civil rights. Aiming to denaturalize argumentation as the goal of academic essays, I offer instead an analysis of Maya’s story in the service of a common fan cultural production: a new scenario dreamed up for the characters. Soap conventions normalize hidden pasts and bodily transformations, and B and B writers well used those conventions to de-scandalize trans genders. But they also evacuated and depoliticized Maya’s backstory. Maya first appeared on the show as a black woman newly released from unjust incarceration, separated from her child in the process, and struggling to survive in the heteropatriarchal, racist carceral state. I want B and B to revisit Maya’s history, dramatizing the role of mass incarceration in the lives of trans people, and particularly trans people of color.