ABSTRACT
Trans literature does not write into a vacuum. Fugitive traces of trans lives that have preceded us—flickers in the margins of police and immigration department records, medical offices and name change bureaus, in boxes of intimate photos and love letters, in attics and refuse sacks, and in the uncodified, unwritten annals of memory—can often be glimpsed threading their way through contemporary trans writing. Sometimes, trans authors actively reach into these haphazard archives through practices including citation, elegy and critical fabulation, fishing out stories that shine new and strange lights on the contemporary moment. Present and past rub up against one another in these archival encounters, generating intertextual/intertemporal frictions and affinities that help us map where we are, now, in relation to where we were, then. This chapter considers the playful archival fictions of Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018), the ambiguous trans traces in Shola von Reinhold’s Lote (2020), and the melancholy archive of Isaac Fellman’s Dead Collections (2022). All three novels show modern researchers grappling with the unique slipperiness of historical transness-on-record, particularly transness as it interacts with other marginalized identities. Rosenberg and Reinhold’s novels examine the defensive evasions and protean creativity of historical transness, its anarchic nature, inherently resistant to the arkheion, meaning “place of institutional power”—the word from which “archive” derives. In Fellman’s novel, meanwhile, archival materials literally corrode in its trans protagonist’s hands, only for him to recuperate them through slow, sensitive care for voices from the vanished past. Drawing on theorizations of queer and trans historiography by writers including Anjali Arondekar, Carolyn Dinshaw, and José Esteban Muñoz, this chapter explores modern efforts to vivify the narratives contained in trans archives. It illuminates the desires, anxieties, and pleasures wrapped up in our encounters with the past.
