Book overview
Mapping Multi-Genre Literary Frameworks for Trans* Studies: Without Permanence examines the socio-political contexts that have necessitated new, twenty-first century methods in transgender (trans*) counter-storytelling. Jesse Jack articulates the role that counter narration serves in representing the empirical needs and realities of gender-transing communities and in modeling negotiations between compliance and resistance, being out and going stealth. As the author contends, gender-transing communities in the West have been particularly constrained by exceptionalisms of permanence through which individuals who access permanent changes to gender markers on documents of origin (e.g., birth certificates) and embodiment (e.g., gender affirming care) are portrayed throughout the media, state surveillance protocols, and medical rubrics as authentic, compliant, and non-threatening in contradistinction to more ambiguously gendered, frequently racialized and sexualized persons. Permanence becomes the exception to the rule that ambiguity presents a threat. Jack argues that exceptional permanence emerged through several mutually reinforcing areas of study: anthropology and the archive, the genre of the trans* autobiography, sexology, migration and surveillance, and transgender exclusionary feminisms. Through literary criticism, this book examines emergent trans* counterstories that construct new intertextual and cross-genre literary forms designed to recognize ambiguity and mitigate the multifaceted demands and origins of permanence.