TransGenre

This Element focuses on revitalizing genre studies to consider transfeminism and trans minor literature's deterritorializing potential.

Aaron Hammes (Author)

9781009502214, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 February 2025

80 pages
23 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.133 kg

TransGenre is a reconsideration of genre theory in long-form fiction through transgender minor literature in the US and Canada. Using four genre sites (the road novel, the mourning novel, the chosen family novel, and the archival novel), this Element considers how the minoritized becomes the minoritarian through deterritorializing generic conventions in fiction to its own ends. In so doing, TransGenre proposes narrative reading practices as strategies of the minor to subvert, transgress, and reappropriate the novel's genealogy and radical future prospects. A range of fiction published in the last decade is deployed as largely self-theorizing, generating its own epistemological, thematic, and formal innovations and possibilities, revealing cisheteronormative underpinnings of generic categories and turning them in on themselves.

1. TransGenre
2. The road novel
3. The mourning novel
4. The (Chosen) family novel
5. The archival novel
6. TransGeneric
Works Cited.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]