Trans Temporality: Narrative, History, and Time

Abstract

This thesis offers a new interpretative model for reading contemporary trans narratives. The overarching argument is that trans life narratives are complex, contradictory, and often resistant to discursive productions of identity, and these forms of resistance can best be understood through the rubric of queer temporality. Trans(sexual/gender) life narratives form an important part of trans subjectivity. Identities that fall outside of heteronormative understandings of the causal relation between sex and gender (and sex and/or gender’s stability over time) are subject to close scrutiny, interrogation, and suspicion within medical, legal, social, and literary contexts. In order to be ‘read’ as authentic, trans subjects must present a life narrative that ‘makes sense’ according to the discursive constructions of (trans)subjectivity already in place: concretized by medical discourse and circulating in the social field. The narratives examined here represent a collection of fictional works and experimental autobiographies that all seek to challenge normative constructions of what it means to cross-identify or transition. The texts discussed in this thesis all share a common strategy for dismantling normative constructions of identity. Rather than challenging sex-gender norms per se, these texts queer time: they distort, challenge, and complicate standardized constructions of temporality, narrative, and history. This thesis argues that self-representations that complicate the temporal order of standard autobiography—of personal history— evoke alternative forms of familial, national and communal history shaped by the queering of time and narrative. These histories, whether personal, genealogical, or national, are represented as non-linear, porous, and open to a multidirectional haunting. In reading trans narratives through the interpretative lens of queer temporality, this thesis aims to reinvigorate ‘queer’ for trans studies, and emphasize the centrality of trans for queer theory’s interest in non-normative time and history.