ABSTRACT
A “trans” approach is mobilized between and across disciplinary or conceptual categories and might be deployed in relation to several areas of critical concern at once, thereby challenging definitional assumptions that push toward separation. In this way a trans perspective helps us theorize the comparative scholarly gesture as potentially disruptive, destabilizing, and transgressive as well as grounded in comparison. A transgender critical perspective invites us to recognize the deep connection between transgender phenomena and the discourses of power in which they are inscribed, to challenge their normativity, and to recognize the ethically and politically productive dimension of that challenge. Howard Chiang’s collection Transgender China marks the important convergence of transgender, transnational, and transdisciplinary critical attitudes in comparative literature. Trans approaches to comparative literature informed by this theory carry an oppositional valence derived from the prefix in the word “transgress,” seeking out transgressive relationships, affiliations, or interconnections among literary texts and their circuits of travel.
