ABSTRACT
Minor literature is literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. This chapter operates from this decisive distinction to trace the contours and potentialities of one minoritarian literature, the contemporary transgender novel in the US and Canada. This study is premised in part on putting the fiction itself (spanning from Imogen Binnie’s Nevada (2014, although reissued in 2022) to Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby (2021) on a plane with theoretical and critical sources (such as work by Riki Wilchins, Kadji Amin, and Paul Preciado, which builds on theories of the minor drawn from Jack Halberstam, Jose Esteban Muñoz, and Sandy Stone, among others), creating a dialogue that does not privilege one discourse over the other. This chapter does not attempt to build out the machinery of minor literature as explanatory or canonizing, but rather to test affinities between seemingly disparate literary works, as well as instigate the novel’s late-stage capacity as a minor form. This testing requires a promiscuous survey of genres (road novel, historical novel, family novel, mourning novel, to name a few) and subject positions (sex-gender, of course, but also class, migrancy, race, and subcultural identities). A full overview of trans minor literature is impossible in a few thousand words, but this chapter attempts to demonstrate and wield the diversity of generic and epistemological conventions, and challenges thereto. The chapter thus engages a series of interrelated queries of the minor: why the novel as a form, what literary genres mean for this minor literature, and what a trans-specific/inclusive literary theory would or would not do. I argue that trans minor literature both revivifies and challenges generic conventions of the novel in service of deterritorializing long-form fiction’s capacity to remap and reformulate minoritarian community.
