ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how trans and gender nonconforming characters mediate watery sites through a variety of literatures, such as, experimental theory, graphic narrative, speculative fiction, the Gothic, historical fiction, and YA literature. I open with Susan Stryker’s foundational “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” (1994), which incorporates her own submarine poetry about living a trans life under the threat of medical violence, and then move to narratives such as Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer (2019), Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021), Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018), and Emme Lund’s The Boy with a Bird in His Chest (2022), before concluding with a brief meditation on the realities of trans swimming in the face of transphobic sports cultures. By attending to trans waters, I emphasize the necessity of queer and trans ecologies to understanding how water mediates pleasures, violences, and myriad affective experiences that accompany the submersion and immersion of the gender nonconforming body. Uniting these voices and texts, this chapter plumbs the depths of bodies of water as they nest intersectional trans pasts, presents, and futures.
