Desired Bodies, Imagining Selves: Ideological Regimes and Creative Praxis in Black Trans Life Writing

Abstract

This dissertation examines contemporary black transgender women’s life writing in the U.S. and uses an interdisciplinary black feminist approach to transgender studies to argue that imagination is a key facet of political resistance and social transformation for these writers. By analyzing the autobiographical acts and embodied and narrative modes of self-fashioning employed by Toni Newman, Janet Mock, CeCe McDonald, and Venus Di’Khadijah Selenite, I explore their subjectivity and self-making through a matrix of narrative and embodied self-fashioning practices I call critical trans* imagination. Through understanding these writers as philosophers who construct radical black trans counternarratives and counterknowledges, this project challenges the hegemonic whiteness inherent to discussions of transgender subjectivity and the transgender memoir genre. In doing so, I illuminate the ideological narrative acts that black trans women writers rely on to sharpen their own sociopolitical consciousness and craft liberatory spaces for all black women. By examining a wide and necessary range of autobiographical acts and texts, such as traditional memoir, prison letters, and digital blogs, my dissertation generates a collage of black trans life in response to the ongoing erasure of trans women of color from dominant discourses. This project interrogates the discursive history of black trans women through an expansive approach to life writing. This study draws connections between the lived experiences of black transgender women and their strategies for imaginatively narrating those experiences through autobiographical writing, providing the basis for a dialogue about the featured writers’ foundational contributions to black feminist and transgender studies. Thus, the second-person narrative voice throughout the dissertation emerges from the dialogic relationship between the black trans women engaged here—from scholars to authors to my own critical voice. I contend that embodied and narrative self-fashioning practices, combined with political consciousness-raising, is a critical form of radical creative praxis for audiences invested in black and trans liberation. Ultimately, this project advances blacktransfeminist thought in transgender studies and cultural studies through investigation of the black trans femme figure in the U.S.