ABSTRACT
The Latin root of the word “radical” is the word “root” itself. Radical novels critique fundamental social categories and orthodoxies, which are the roots of social relations. Radical novels also contest reactionary politics and gesture towards utopian horizons of a world lived differently. This discussion of the radical novel argues that contemporary American examples include trans literature. Trans identities and experiences featured in trans literature challenge the foundation of hierarchical regimes: the naturalization of social categories and orthodoxies. As recent trans scholarship such as that of Joni Alizah Cohen and Zavier Nunn’s avers, transphobia has been a key part of reactionary ideology at least since it was fundamentally incorporated by the Nazis. A correlation between the radical novel and the trans experience may be best described by Susan Stryker: “transgender studies is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specificity of the sexually differentiated human body [and] the social roles and statuses that a particular form of body is expected to occupy.” With close readings of Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018) and Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby (2021) and critiques of gender essentialism and the nuclear family, this chapter argues that the trans novel’s recognition of trans identities and experiences provide a radical critique of these normative linkages. As the increase of anti-trans legislation corresponds with record amounts of anti-trans violence, trans literature has revitalized the content, form, and significance of the radical novel.
