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Chapter 4 - Breaking the Binaries

New Audacity in the Writing of Trans Lives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2020

Jennifer Cooke
Affiliation:
Loughborough University
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Summary

Chapter 4 analyses recent writing by and about trans people with a twofold aim: to examine how they challenge binary thinking, and to explore their understanding of how gender identity interacts with and is circumscribed by heteropatriarchal capitalist institutions and norms. I examine how Juliet Jacques’ Trans: A Memoir (2015) and ‘Weekend in Brighton’ (2015), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) abandon the tradition within earlier trans life-writing of focusing upon transition as the dramatic apex of the narrative. In different manners, all of these writers are arguing for an expansion of the term ‘trans’. In the case of Nelson and Preciado this extends, controversially, to name other states of flux, such as the pregnant female body or the flow of information and data. This chapter examines these audacious attempts to both naturalise and expand ‘trans’, as well as Jacques’s dedramatizing prose, arguing that these writers testify to a new twenty-first-century understanding of gender identity from which feminism, social behaviour, and societal organisation can be reappraised.

Type
Chapter
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Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing
The New Audacity
, pp. 134 - 169
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Breaking the Binaries
  • Jennifer Cooke, Loughborough University
  • Book: Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing
  • Online publication: 31 March 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779692.005
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  • Breaking the Binaries
  • Jennifer Cooke, Loughborough University
  • Book: Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing
  • Online publication: 31 March 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779692.005
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Breaking the Binaries
  • Jennifer Cooke, Loughborough University
  • Book: Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing
  • Online publication: 31 March 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779692.005
Available formats
×