"Recently, ""trans"" has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. As a prefix, ""trans"" can attach itself to other words to express or describe movement and change, as it does in the terms ""transnational"" or ""transmedia."" Trans is also an adjective when it is part of a word that signifies an identity or expression. Trans has worked as an adjective to destabilize established ideas about gender as it makes new senses of what gender can mean for trans people.
Much of the study of life writing is about the study of identity and the possibilities for lives that stories of identity make possible. In that spirit, Trans Narratives: trans, transmedia, transnational represents an opportunity for critical work about life writing by trans people to be featured, as it seeks to interrogate the idea of trans in multiple registers, bringing a prefix to the center of the current field of life-writing studies. It aims to understand through life writing and its theory what trans means when we talk about identities and bodies, and to understand better what the critical terms transmedia and transnational can mean for the field of life writing.
The Chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies."
Introduction Unfixing the Prefix in Life-Writing Studies: Trans, Transmedia, Transnational Ana Horvat, Orly Lael Netzer, Sarah McRae and Julie Rak Essays 1. Becoming Culturally (Un)intelligible: Exploring the Terrain of Trans Life Writing Evan Vipond 2. Posttranssexual Temporalities: Negotiating Canonical Memoir Narratives in Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and Juliet Jacques’s Trans Chiara Pellegrini 3. Examining Trans Narratives in the Wake of Norway’s Gender Recognition Law france rose hartline 4. Against a Single Story: Diverse Trans* Narratives in Autobiographical Documentary Film Sarah Ray Rondot 5. Transnational Digital Biography: The Forgetting and Remembering of Winifred Atwell Pamela Graham Critical Response 6. The Afterlives of Stars, Known and Unknown Lily Cho How Would You Teach It? 7. Potential for Healing and Harm: Teaching Trans Narratives to Trans Students Erica Chu 8. Learning to Listen: The Power of Transnational Life Storytelling Leila Moayeri Pazargadi What’s Next? 9. What’s Next is the Past Lucas Crawford
Ana Horvat is lecturer for Soochow University. They have been published in the a/b: Auto/Biography Studies journal. Orly Lael Netzer is Assistant Lecturer at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her work focuses on transnational auto/biography, testimony, and ethics. She has co-edited special issues of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and has been published in Canadian Literature. Sarah McRae is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Her doctoral research, parts of which have been published in Persona Studies, was on digital self-representation, authenticity, and anti-fans. She currently writes on economic policy for the Atlantic Institute of Policy Research. Julie Rak holds the Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of the forthcoming False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction (2021) and many other books, collections and articles about nonfiction, popular culture, and print culture.
