Trans Forms: Gender-Variant Subjectivity and First-Person Narration

Abstract

My thesis argues for the ‘gender-variant’ narrator as a key figure in contemporary Anglophone literature. I examine first-person narratives from the past five decades in a range of genres (memoir, literary fiction, science fiction, historical fiction) that explore gender identities that are other than binary or fixed. The purposes and impacts of these narratives vary according to their different engagement with feminist, queer and trans theory and activism. These differences can be ultimately read in the formal choices (uses of temporality, pronouns, metaphors, focalisation, description, etc.) of the texts representing gender-variant narrators. Throughout the thesis, I establish a methodology at the intersection of studies of narrative form and studies of trans and non-binary gender identity. In Chapter One, I develop two key concepts as part of this methodology: trans-inhabitation and re-narration. Trans-inhabitation builds on theorisations of gender as space in trans, queer and feminist theory and on narratological understandings of metaphor: it designates an inhabitation of gender categories that is successive, multiple and/or in between, and I argue that gender-variant narrators trans-inhabit genders and texts. Re-narration designates the way in which narratives of gender variance exist in tension with canonical plots of transition, disrupting them and reconfiguring them. In Chapters Two to Six, I test this methodology on a range of contemporary texts with gender-variant narrators. My conclusion summarises what has emerged from these readings in relation to the politically and textually resonant concepts of ‘visibility’ and ‘voice’ and argues for an examination of metaphors of time and space that does not only apply to gender in an abstract manner but considers the geographical realities of borders, homes and inhabitations.