UC Santa Barbara

This interdisciplinary dissertation, titled “Staking Our Claim: Self-Making, World-Making and Survival in Trans-Authored Narratives,” analyzes transness as a concept and its expression in trans-authored memoirs, poetry, and fiction. In it, I develop a trans forager methodology to underline the narrative tropes through which transness has been made legible in the 20th- and 21st-century Global North. I argue that the context of white supremacy, imperialism, ableism, and anti-Blackness through which transness came to be in 1950s America has shaped how we understand transness as a self-centered project motivated by negative affect. My research is here invested in proposing a different story of transness, one told through the centering of diverse and oft under-represented trans of color perspectives. Chapter One, “Neoliberal Autobiographies: White-Washed Histories and The Making of the Respectable Trans Subject,” centers Chase Joynt’s 2022 movie Framing Agnes and new archival research into Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological study in the 1950s. It highlights the heteropatriarchal, ableist, and white supremacist biases that led Garfinkel to select Agnes as the case study for his research on gender, because of her adherence to white-centric understandings of femininity, and by extension her ability to make claim to respectable whiteness, while other interviewees, due to their non-normative racial, sexual, or disabled identity, were discarded. This in turn influenced the trans history one typically remembers in the West and the narrative tropes circulated by popular trans autobiographies. In Chapter Two, “Trans Evidence of Being: Autobiographical Self-Determination as Collective Practice of Survival,” I examine early newspaper coverage and self-writings by Black trans women such as Carlett Angianlee Brown, Delisa Newton, Sharon Davis, and Ceyenne Doroshow to propose a counter-narrative to Chapter 1. I highlight here an understanding of transness as a relational identity geared towards care work, solidarity, and community-building, and underline how these autobiographies are used to resist any individualistic project and instead strive towards collective survival. My third chapter, “Anti-Death and the Ethics of Poeliving: Trans Poetics and the Language of Collective Survival,” proposes a comparative study of contemporary US and Nazi Germany by examining the poetics of survival employed and theorized by contemporary trans-of-color poets such as Ryka Aoki, Caleb Luna, or jaye simpson, and trans people who lived in Nazi-controlled Europe, such as Ovida Delect, Lucy Salani, or Liddy Bacroff. I centrally use Delect’s deployment of poetry as anti-death and ethical conceptualization of poeliving to highlight poetry as a technique of struggle against the atmospheric violence that surrounds trans-of-color life. In Chapter Four, “Dreaming the Past; Remembering the Future: Apocalyptical Relationality, Oniric Transtopia and Relational Transness in Trans Fiction and Speculation,” I focus on how science-fiction and speculation are used by trans-of-color authors and performers for world-making and self-making. I identify specific narrative orientations such as oniric transtopia, dis/utopia, and apocalyptical relationality as tools used to propose a communal understanding of transness that goes beyond the here, the now, and the human. Through these chapters, my intervention is not to merely add trans and trans-of-color perspectives to our fields but to make them central and fully embrace the restructuring of thought that trans orientations to life, being, time, and writing require of us.