| Description: |
This dissertation examines the construction of trans identity within and beyond systemic structures that both validate and constrain legibility. Through close readings of transmasculine memoirs and interwoven personal narrative of my own, this project interrogates the ways trans authors navigate the paradox of seeking recognition while resisting the frameworks that render them pathologized subjects. While trans narratives offer a means of self-articulation and cultural visibility, they are also shaped by institutions that define trans identity through medicalization, correction, and coherence. By tracing the genealogy of transmasculine memoirs from the 1990s to the present, this project highlights the ways these texts reinforce and resist dominant narratives of transition, dysphoria, and institutional validation.Drawing from José Muñoz’s disidentification, Leslie Feinberg’s freedom of gender expression, Sianne Ngai’s ugly feelings, Cameron Awkward-Rich’s trans maladjustment, Hilde Lindemann’s holding and letting go, and Joseph Slaughter’s bildungsroman as a technology of personhood, this work challenges the expectation that trans narratives must resolve in legibility and wholeness. Instead, it advocates for reading trans stories through their narrative ruptures, contradictions, and refusals to conform to coherent identity scripts. The first chapters situate trans memoirs within a literary and historical context, demonstrating how their structure creates space for trans visibility while also reinforcing and/or navigating the exclusions of medical and legal frameworks. Later chapters analyze contemporary trans narratives that disrupt the bildungsroman model through aesthetic nervousness, genre subversion, and spiritual reclamation. At its core, this project critiques how trans people are made to author themselves into coherence for systemic validation. It argues that liberation lies not in perfecting legibility but in resisting the compulsion to be rendered fully knowable by institutions that legislate existence. ... |