Unfixing the Prefix in Life-Writing Studies: Trans, Transmedia, Transnational

Recently, trans has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. It is a prefix that conveys the send of “across, through, over, to or on the other side of, beyond, outside of, from one place, person, thing, or state to another.”¹ As a prefix, trans can attach itself to other words to express or describe movement and change, as it does in the terms transnational or transmedia. In this sense, trans affects what we think we know about media or nation, attaching itself to other words to destabilize or challenge settled knowledge about the world we live in.

Trans is also an adjective, however, when it is part of a word that signifies an identity or expression. As an adjective, it has worked to destabilize established ideas about gender as it makes new senses of what gender can mean for trans people. Trans* in the Oxford English Dictionary as an adjective appears alongside words with suffixes such as “sexual” and “gender.” When it is a word that changes other words, it keeps in view the existence of trans people and the stories they tell about themselves, as opposed to inaccurate stories that are often told about them. Trans modifies and it is, by necessity, expansive in its meanings As the Oxford English Dictionary states, trans is inclusive as a term because it signifies that there is more than one meaning and more than one way to understand the identities and expressions it names.² Trans as an adjective or prefix is about being and becoming. It comes before what it changes and it sets other words in motion. It signifies what it means to be on the move, both in the world and in individual lives.

Much of the study of life writing is about the study of identity and the possibilities for lives that stories of identity make possible. That is why, in this special issue, we wanted to create an opportunity for critical work about life writing by trans people to be featured, as we seek to interrogate the idea of trans in multiple registers, bringing a prefix to the center of the current field of life-writing studies. We want to understand through life writing and its theory what trans means when we talk about identities and bodies, and to understand better what the critical terms transmedia and transnational can mean for the field of life writing itself.

Thinking about Trans: *, Nation, Media

When we originally shared our call for papers, we encouraged contributors to think of trans* alongside transmedia and transnational as concepts, to see what conversations and new directions of inquiry would emerge if we thought between and around the term. What is trans? Is it a discourse, an identity category, an interpretive strategy? How do the global and local transits and transactions of trans categories construct different understandings of subjectivity, agency, identity, and relationality? When we began the work for “Trans Narratives,” we asked for contributions that moved with, across, and through trans in more than one sense, honoring the lives and stories of trans people, and thinking about other meanings for trans at the same time. Most of the contributions we received were about trans* expression and identity, showing us that there is a need within auto|biography studies to engage better with trans studies and trans* life narratives. The prevalence of trans* experiences among the collected contributions is part of a strong interest in embodied experiences and autobiographical acts, and the political, methodological, and ethical questions raised in these contributions are part of a tradition of social justice activism in auto|biography studies. Having said this, we understand differences between trans*, transnational narratives, and transmedia to be productive, creating connections between each other at some points and, at others, highlighting how different each term is in its critical genealogy and valences.

For example, the intersection of transnational and trans* appears in the earliest trans memoirs, including Lili Elbe’s Man into Woman, Christine Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography, and Jan Morris’s Conundrum. In each of these narratives, the authors travel to and live in multiple countries and land in Germany, Denmark, and Morocco (respectively) in order to receive gender-confirmation surgeries. The trend of traveling for surgery, as Aren Aizura argues in Mobile Subjects, has continued in contemporary trans memoirs in the form of “biomedical tourism,” primarily to Thailand, as in Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness.³ While some trans authors, like Elbe and Jorgensen, develop affective ties to the countries that enabled them to transition, for others, travel for surgery is merely a chapter in their lives.

In another example of connection, the state of being a trans* and a transnational person (what we could call “trans*national”) has been taken up in the Lebanese Canadian poetry of Trish Salah and in work on the US influence on trans* and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) populations in Haiti (Erin Durban-Albrecht, Dasha Chapman, Mario LaMothe, and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley), Indonesia (Paige Johnson), and Argentina (Christoph Hansmann). In a similar way, it is possible to understand transnational issues connected to forced or voluntary migration as part of transmedia, as the lives of others are documented and made into stories mediated for global consumption and circulation. The policing of bodies, personal agency, and privacy in service to and protection of the nation are evident in transmedia, trans*, and transnational studies alike. Projects like Lily Cho’s Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens or the website Invisible Australians: Living under the White Australia Policy, developed by Tim Sherratt and a student team, provide prominent examples of these tensions in ways that inextricably tie transnational and transmedia experiences and research.

Making connections between trans*, transmedia, and the idea of the transnational does not mean, of course, that the terms are interchangeable. The possibility of connection also signals the work of difference and, to us, this means that the multiple meanings of “trans” have to be acknowledged and explored at the same time.

Trans*

In trans studies, the term trans*, an abbreviation of the terms transgender and transsexual, is often combined with a hyphen, asterisk, or slash to reflect the “inherently unfinishable combinatorial work” of the trans prefix as it expands into other research fields.⁴ With the increasing interdisciplinarity of trans studies, it is important that the prefix trans stay grounded in trans(gender) identity while also exploring the potential of relating transness to other experiences of being “across” or “between.” Although we recognize that some critics have read the asterisk attached to the term “trans” as potentially excluding members of trans communities not involved in academia,⁵ we nevertheless see the asterisk as a way of differentiating between the three iterations of trans in this special issue and as a way of highlighting possible connections between the three terms. In a context where trans* is at risk of being easily interchangeable with transnational and transmedia and seen as “the same trans,” it is important to note as well that the asterisk functions as a way of opening up discussions of transness in intersectional and interdisciplinary ways while remaining grounded in trans experiences.⁶

Nevertheless, if the trans in transgender is the same trans as in transnational, the question of what trans means must be “an open comparative question without a singular, universal answer [that] allows us to see the important ways that the prefix ‘trans’ can work to destabilize discourses of both nationality and gender without erasing their specific nuances or foreclosing their possibilities of divergence.”⁷ Trans is a prefix that requires connection and context; trans* can stand alone as an adjective or a noun and signify gender identity, but the asterisk is a reminder that gender identity is always also inflected by affective, cultural, racial, socioeconomic, and environmental factors. Just as transnational cannot be reduced to one geographical location versus another, trans* cannot be reduced to the space between male and female.

The field of trans studies has recently put issues such as Blackness, translation, animalities, and pedagogies into conversation with transness in an attempt to map out the scope of influences that shape trans* experiences, representations, and concerns.⁸ There is, however, little conversation between the fields of life writing and trans studies, and it will be the task of the emerging field of trans life writing and autobiographical acts to bridge this gap. Transness and life writing have always been intimately and sometimes problematically intertwined. The uncomfortable link to the medical establishment came, as Jay Prosser has argued, from the necessity of having to “recount a transsexual autobiography” in the doctor’s office, if one wanted to get a diagnosis that would enable access to hormones or surgery.⁹ Trans memoir, which transcended the pulp genre after the media hype surrounding Jorgensen’s transition in the 1950s, has been marked and mediated by the influence of cisgender editors, often resulting in narratives foregrounding “titillating details” about surgeries and sharp contrasts between male and female experiences of the world.¹⁰ Early memoirs, such as Elbe’s Man into Woman and Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography, were accompanied by prefaces from doctors who legitimized the narratives. Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw was the first memoir to make significant changes to the trans-memoir format by introducing queer theory and insisting “that it is gender stereotypes and social sex-role fascism that [are] pathological, not transsexuality.”¹¹ After Bornstein, there have been several trans memoirs that troubled the established surgery-driven format or introduced new topics. Mock’s Redefining Realness troubled the dominant whiteness of trans memoir as well as the notion that transition is an event that always happens in middle age. Another recent memoir, Juliet Jacques’s Trans, merged a transition narrative with trans theory and trans pop culture. Although memoir remains the most widely recognizable form of trans autobiographical acts, trans stories and art have also proliferated in areas such as performance art, where artists like Cassils and Nina Arsenault have turned to performing trans embodiments through “intra-actions with objects” instead of narrating recognizable trans narratives.¹²

Pointing to the possibilities of complexifying the trans-memoir genre from within, in a recent issue of a/b, Sarah Ray Rondot foregrounded examples of trans memoirs that “narrate continuous subjects rather than subjects split between pre- and post-transition” and that “put forth a new way to understand and narrate trans identity by exploring rather than justifying trans experience.”¹³ Similarly, in a recent issue of Life Writing, Jacques argued for trans memoir (or transition memoir) as a genre “with recognizable clichés and conventions,” and showed how trans authors have used “fiction, or a blurring of boundaries between autobiography and fiction, to resist some of the structural and social limits of trans life writing.”¹⁴ Yet much of the work on autobiographical trans social media, such as Rachel Reinke’s work on disability, race, and mental health on YouTube or Eliza Steinbock’s work on T-selfies, has been published in fields other than life writing.

The emerging field of trans life writing, which this special issue will hopefully help consolidate, must now address the corpus of trans memoir spanning back decades while at the same time engaging with trans theory and nontextual forms of trans autobiographical acts and being mindful of not perpetuating the hegemonic whiteness of trans memoir. For many young trans writers and creators, the often stifling conventions, as well as the cisgender gatekeeping of trans memoir, have resulted in an abandonment of the genre for the now burgeoning areas of trans novels and poetry. For those who stay related to the realm of the autobiographical, self-publishing, Tumblr, YouTube, performance, and Instagram have provided platforms for speaking out about salient political issues that impact trans lives and self-representations. In the installation entitled Pissed, Cassils collected two hundred gallons of their own urine as a protest performance against restrictive bathroom legislations in the US. On Instagram, micha cárdenas created #Stronger, an online-offline project empowering trans people of color to use exercise as a means of fighting trans necropolitics. Works such as Cassils’ and cárdenas’s, in combination with the interdisciplinary focuses of trans studies, should be put in conversation with the legacies of trans memoir in order to address the complexities of trans self-representation and the precarity of trans people’s current political situations.

Transmedia

Media scholar Henry Jenkins writes that “Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.”¹⁵ There are some wording choices here that we should problematize, particularly the word fiction. The use of this term excludes what is perhaps the most common instance of transmedia storytelling—the everyday transmedia self-representational output of casual social media users. The ways that transmedia appear in social media are not always systematic or unified and coordinated, despite the status of transmedia as somewhat of a marketing buzzword in popular usage, particularly when marketing literature invokes the term to describe brand storytelling across multiple media platforms as a way to engage the consumer in an immersive advertising campaign.¹⁶ Jenkins, on the other hand, has media franchises in mind when he uses the word—think, for example, of the massive media output surrounding storytelling worlds like the Marvel universe, which includes films, television series, comics, video games, and more. Although Jenkins conceives of transmedia as a conceptual tool for thinking about how fictional stories are disseminated across different platforms and locations, this term has great potential as a lens for considering how lives are constructed across multiple media platforms.

Online social networking affordances,¹⁷ or the possibilities for what content creators and consumers can do with a platform through designing, manipulating, sharing, linking, and expressing reactions to content, make it easy to link different components of digital storytelling into cross-platform, multigenre representations of a life. For example, we see developments in the way identity is commonly articulated through the popular online practice, encouraged by platforms like Tumblr and Pinterest, of curating albums of photographs, graphics, snippets of text, and other content from diverse transmedia sources (sources that can be explored by clicking on hyperlinked content) into digital repositories that can constitute self-representational assemblages, where the act of linking media across platforms and genres is itself expressive of identity—evoking Anna Poletti’s discussion of zines and the practice of collage as auto|assemblage and an autobiographical act of editing, manipulating, and reproduction.¹⁸ These developments in interface design prompt users to create and navigate self-representational media across platforms, and invite us to consider what it means, exactly, to construct transmedia selves. However, transmedia can refer to more than media franchises or brand storytelling, or even cross-platform social media output. When self-representational media connect across genres and platforms, those genres and platforms are often interpreted in relation to each other, transforming how audiences make meaning of the autobiographical objects they encounter.

Self-representation across media is not a new phenomenon either. For the few and the famous, audience appetite for autobiographical detail before the advent of social media meant that celebrities could develop transmedia personas across a variety of media platforms. Audiences consumed print memoir alongside other ways to consume celebrity lives, such as television appearances or radio interviews. But the unprecedented ease with which we travel at the present time between different media genres and platforms as we navigate an online life narrative or archive is what makes transmedia seem so novel and significant today. This sense of novelty could help auto|biography studies reconceptualize how we encounter lives across media, even when the objects in question are not new. For example, in a media environment where self-representational artifacts are so often hyperlinked to other materials, sources, and evidence of the “life” or person behind the output, it can be jarring when we cannot navigate some self-representational pathways with the same ease. As Cho observes in this issue, the absence of “originals” is conspicuous and lamentable when working with digitized or otherwise transcribed materials. In the case of the microfilm CI 9s (Chinese Immigration 9s) Cho examines, material elements we know once existed but that can no longer be accessed may have enriched our understanding of the artifacts and the context of their production and circulation.

Although transmedia as a concept and descriptor seems particularly well suited to discussions of digital and digitized self-representation, we can think about nondigital objects that pay similar attention to the pathways between media, including the pathways that get interrupted or cut short. Some forms of autobiographical discourse that have been and remain auto|biography studies’ objects of study—a handwritten journal entry or note, photographs, a letter—may be striking for their separation from other referents or from the objects that may at one time have been physically proximate to or part of a transmedia life “story,” such as a diary and a photograph album that once occupied the same drawer but now cannot be traced back to each other. We feel this loss sometimes even with born-digital artifacts. In April 2009, for instance, Yahoo pulled its subsidiary GeoCities from the Web, since the once popular web-hosting service was no longer profitable. Nearly a decade later, an online art project called One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age documents the process and rewards of sorting through archived content that was salvaged by web crawlers in the weeks before the web service was shut down.¹⁹ The archived web pages were personal home pages created in the 1990s. Like microfiche photographs, the preserved websites refer to, but are not identical to, the “live” equivalents that have been lost. Not only are the original links broken and many of the images missing (in cases where the hosting service for the image no longer exists), but we can access only individual pages of the original websites without exploring the rest of what a particular website had to offer—that is, we see only what the web crawler was able to capture and what the blog creators decided to feature on the website. In the case of One Terabyte, the loss of the originals leads to the archived pages taking on a kind of aura in Walter Benjamin’s sense, where exhibiting them on their own has the effect of transforming often banal shows of mediocre design into historical objects worthy of display.²⁰ Encountering disconnected components that used to be interlinked in a larger transmedia life narrative can be jarring or otherwise affect-laden, implying that the idea or expectation of “more” impacts much of our interaction with autobiographical content.

Transmedia’s relevance for the study of auto|biographical discourse extends beyond its ability to describe how multimedia components of identity construction link together to convey a life narrative. Because transmedia as a theoretical concept invites us to think about how linked-together bodies or ecologies of representational content combine to form narratives (or even subvert narratives, if the linked elements contradict each other), it can also lead us to consider the media or objects we cannot access. Whether they have been lost or destroyed, or whether a “link” (digital or physical) has been severed, often the loss of these components is conspicuous and strongly felt. When Cho describes the lamentable absence of physical photographs and negatives when working solely with microfilm, we are invited to think about how that absence is registered and consider its affective weight.

Transnational

Since the 1990s, transnationalism has been gaining traction as a term that describes a state of being, a critical or methodological paradigm, and the global flow of peoples, goods, and capital across national borders. Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt define transnational studies as an interdisciplinary scholarly field, designed to “uncover, analyze and conceptualize … interactions” within, between, and beyond nations, to examine how they shape realities and lives across time and space.²¹ Within literary studies, transnationalism emerged in response to the presence of a single, homogenizing nationalist narrative for national literature. Transnational approaches, defined by Paul Jay, responded to “social movements … linked to the rise of minority, multicultural, and postcolonial studies … [that] laid the groundwork for the transnationalizing of literary studies.”²² Many of the leading voices that have made space for multicultural, feminist, postcolonial, and in turn transnational studies—including Arjun Appadurai, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sneja Gunew, and Himani Bannerji—have tended to theorize from, and as, lived experience. Transnational lives and their study, then, have always been situated in relation to life writing as a mode of representation and as an intellectual and political endeavor.

Nonetheless, as a multifaceted concept, transnationalism remains a nebulous term, often conflated with the equally fashionable and equally fraught concept of diaspora or appearing as part of the category of globalization. Across its registers, there are only two things that remain constant and clear about the term. First, transnationalism is an inherently relational concept that both describes and interrogates notions of “transit and transaction.”²³ Akhil Gupta notes that perhaps the term’s most central point of relation is the nation, assumed as a prerequisite and highlighted as both a prevalent and a constructed apparatus that governs lives, whether via shared imaginaries or physical borders.²⁴ This relation to nation serves to expose the second characteristic of transnationalism: it refers to both a theoretical model and a lived condition. As Jay observes, the term transnationalism is defined by a tension between globalized economies and technologies, on the one hand, and postcolonial histories and legacies, on the other.²⁵ Jay argues that it is within this tense relation that the danger of transnationalism lies—namely, when it serves as a prism for the promotion of a universalizing, borderless image of globalization, transnationalism runs the risk of not interrogating its traditions of historical and political decontextualization.²⁶

Within the field of auto|biographical or life-writing studies, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson note that scholarship of the last four decades has been dedicated to dispelling the myth of autobiography as an exclusively Western tradition (originating in Enlightenment-era individualism), in great part through a focus on acts that record and trace transnational lives across historical periods and locations.²⁷ The works of Gillian Whitlock, Caren Kaplan, Marlene Kadar, Marianne Hirsch, Nancy K. Miller, Margareta Jolly, Leigh Gilmore, and Smith and Watson themselves have drawn attention to transnationalism as a lived experience that reflects “globalization from below.”²⁸ Drawing their authority from the cultural power of truth-telling,²⁹ transnational autobiographies share experiences of voluntary and forced global transits—from the traces of slave-ship logs and recorded slave narratives to online livestreams by asylum-seekers or persons defined as illegal aliens—in order to explore the values of lives and testify to violations of persons’ humanity.³⁰ With their work deeply grounded in feminist ethics, many life-writing scholars who explore transnational stories note the texts’ aims to shape public debate as a means of effecting social change.³¹

Whitlock claims that such transformations are achieved via the texts’ global transits, or “the work of contemporary autobiography as it moves across cultures in conflict.”³² These global movements of the texts and the experiences they share include particular dangers, however, primarily because, once a narrative is shared, the autobiographical subject loses control of its movements and meanings. Kaplan warns that the texts’ meanings can be mobilized in ways that reproduce neocolonial attitudes, while Whitlock, like Jay, argues that they may serve to “naturalize the doxa of globalization: the neoliberal discourse of the free circulation of ideas, goods and peoples in global networks of exchange.”³³ In order to contend with these risks, scholars of transnational life writing suggest methodologies that demand and model situating these texts within multiple contexts—from Kaplan’s transnational reading strategies that position texts within authors’ national intellectual traditions and political histories,³⁴ to Whitlock’s or Schaffer and Smith’s considerations of the ways processes of production, circulation, and consumption shape the political and ethical effects of autobiographical acts on both local and global scales.³⁵

Discussions of methodology in transnational life-writing studies address the potential dangers of autobiographical transits by emphasizing a relational aspect of transnational life stories—namely, understanding the texts and their transits as a conversation “defined through who listens, how, and for what interest.”³⁶ Recent research highlights the relationship between transnational and Indigenous lives and their study. Since transnational life narratives circulate as part of soft power, what Whitlock has called “soft weapons” that can be co-opted into neocolonial or universalizing global images,³⁷ they run the risk of rendering Indigenous lives invisible. But scholars of life writing—from Whitlock to Deanna Reder, Cynthia Franklin, Laura Beard, and Eva Karpinski—have been working to bring into the transnational conversation considerations of Indigenous lives. These scholars do so through the prisms of Indigenous nation-based autobiographical and intellectual traditions, centering the agency and sovereignty of Indigenous nations and subjects, thus situating Indigenous voices and knowledges as integral counterparts and equal participants in the conversation, sharing the aim of unsettling Western nationalist paradigms from within.

Trans Narratives: The Contributions

The first five essays of “Trans Narratives” take up different approaches within trans studies as they address what forms the expression of trans life takes in memoirs, interviews, social media, and film.

Evan Vipond’s discussion of several mainstream trans memoirs is informed by Judith Butler’s concept of cultural intelligibility, “a tool to theorize how one’s gender identity becomes legible to others through the use of language and repetition.” Vipond points to trans life writers, such as Janet Mock, who have risked unintelligibility in resistances to the conventions of the trans memoir. Taking a different approach to the consideration of memoir, Chiara Pellegrini extends the conversation on trans memoir as a space of constrictions and resistances through her consideration of the posttranssexual temporalities in Kate Bornstein’s canonical Gender Outlaw and Juliet Jacques’s Trans.

Rather than asking what trans is, france rose hartline asks us to consider the ways in which legal and political frameworks continue to constrain how the subject negotiates transness and articulates trans identity, even after hard-won victories win new rights for trans people. He invites firsthand accounts from trans people, in which they recount their experience of being in Norway as transmasculine people following (and preceding) legal changes that allowed individuals to change their legal gender without first requiring them to submit to medical procedures, including sterilization.

Sarah Ray Rondot takes up the question of singularity—of a trans life and a documentary method—in “Against a Single Story: Diverse Trans* Narratives in Autobiographical Documentary Film.” Rondot takes on the notion that there is one way to make documentary and one way to document the lives of trans people, examining films by Jules Rosskam and Gwen Tara Haworth that reject the medical model of transition and seek within an autobiographical documentary form to tell stories by trans people—not about them—on their own terms.

The special issue then moves to a consideration of transnational approaches to biography in an article by Pamela Graham and a response by Cho. Graham’s essay, “Transnational Digital Biography: The Forgetting and Remembering of Winifred Atwell,” makes three distinctive moves as she discusses the life of Winifred Atwell: proposing a new category of biography, exploring the role of the biographer and biography in the digital age, and showcasing how the digital age can reshape cultural memory of what Graham calls “the famous forgotten”—people like Atwell who were internationally famous in their day but have faded from public view beyond the national constraints usually associated with archival collection. Atwell, a transnational artist, is a good case study for considering how digital archiving can introduce old performances to new audiences, in new formats, allowing deceased artists’ work to transcend national borders, as Atwell herself did in life.

Graham’s provocations regarding the digital turn and its effects on transnational biographic materials and practices drew us to invite Cho to reflect on her Mass Capture project and how it engages with Graham’s argument. Mass Capture “examines an extraordinary collection of Chinese Canadian head tax certificates known as CI 9s in order to understand the relationship between surveillance and the production of non-citizens in Canada.”³⁸ In “The Afterlives of Stars, Known and Unknown,” Cho uses her work on this project, together with Graham’s essay, to think about sites of loss and how autobiographical traces can be reconstructed and thus enter cultural memory. Graham focuses on Atwell as a “famous-forgotten” figure, but Cho’s subjects were not just unknown—they “were not even legal persons.”³⁹ In her attention to the ways the nation-state recorded traces of lives made illegal as a means of managing its institutionalized racism, Cho, like Graham, makes evident the intricately intimate ways in which national structures penetrate and police transnational bodies and lives.

In the section called “How Would You Teach It?” the special issue turns to practical concerns about teaching autobiographical trans narratives and transnational narratives in the classroom. Erica Chu’s and Leila Pazargadi’s short reflections on teaching gender-variant and transnational students respectively position instructors and students as storytellers and listeners implicated in trans* and transnational experiences and lives. Both Pazargadi and Chu urge readers to focus on the needs of trans* and transnational students in their classrooms as they offer critical practices for instructors and healing spaces for students. While Pazargadi focuses on the healing potential of teaching transnational narratives, Chu warns against the perpetuation of violence against trans* people in the space of the classroom. Both essays confront instructors with powerful ideas about the operation of difference in the classroom, and the importance of holding together interconnected aspects of student identity and identity issues that students are learning about. Each essay affirms the importance of equipping students with tangible strategies that, as Pazargadi reminds us, are much needed and highly urgent in the current times of political crises.

“Trans Narratives” ends with a meditation by critic and poet Lucas Crawford about the relationship of trans* people to the idea of time. Taking up the “What’s Next?” theme of many special issues of a/b, Crawford highlights the past and its problems for trans* people. Trans* people are erased from most history, Crawford says, but at the same time they are not allowed by dominant cisgender discourse to ever leave their pasts behind because they must perform the story of their “before” and “after” identities for the cisgendered world, telling the story of transition over and over again. Crawford poses this provocation to the readers of a/b: “What’s next? Let trans pasts do anything other than shore up the feigned stability and predictability of cis futures.” With that, Crawford invites trans* creators to mess up the past, refuse the future, and not play to the popularity of some versions of trans* life in the present.

As scholars and creative workers interested in auto|biography studies know, no life story is simple to create or interpret. In that complexity lies enormous potential for all kinds of stories, and theories, to think about the slippery nature of trans as an adjective that names an identity and an expression, and as a transitive word, something that sets life in motion, that destabilizes what has been assumed to be the truth of gender, of national identity, of the media that increasingly structure our lives and the stories we have to tell. The image we chose for the cover, Beyond My Face by Paola Baaz, expresses our intention to connect the idea of trans across media. The work—by an Italian-born artist who works in the United Kingdom—appears to be a portrait, but a portrait that foregrounds its own construction from other media and that breaks apart the notion of a “natural” face. Beyond My Face is about the difficulty of thinking about identity as a marker. It evokes a body and it seems to suggest identity, but the three-dimensional ridges, the text telling us to “view” the image, and the paper-cutout elements of the piece call into question the idea of identities with fixed limits. The work asks its viewers to think about the terms of recognition. “Trans Narratives” is committed to asking what the terms of recognition should be when we unfix what might seem to be settled ideas, putting into motion new approaches to the study of gender, identity, place, and media.

University of Alberta

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Notes

1 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “trans, prefix.”

2 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “trans*, adj.”

3 Aizura, Mobile Subjects, 8.

4 Stryker and Currah, “Introduction,” .

5 For more details on the debate, see “Why We Used Trans*” and Serano, “Regarding Trans* and Transgenderism.”

6 Berman, “Is the Trans?”

7 Berman, 217.

8 For intersections of transness and blackness, see Snorton, Black on Both Sides and Ellison et al., “We Got Issues”; for animalities, see Hayward and Weinstein, “Introduction”; for trans pedagogies, see Nicolazzo, Marine, and Galarte, “Introduction”; for translation, see Gramling and Dutta, “Introduction.”

9 Prosser, Second Skins, 101.

10 Mock, Redefining Realness, 227.

11 Califia, Sex Changes, 190.

12 Horvat, “Tranimacies,” 396.

13 Rondot, “‘Bear Witness,’” 527.

14 Jacques, “Forms of Resistance,” 358–359.

15 Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.”

16 One example of this use of transmedia can be found in Fiorelli, “Transmedia Storytelling.”

17 Citing psychologist James Gibson’s use of affordance to describe what an environment offers or furnishes an animal (what the animal can do with its surroundings), Don Norman adapted and popularized the term for design theory with his discussion of how physical and graphical interfaces result in “perceived affordances” in Design of Everyday Things. The term has been used lately in the study of auto|biography studies to prompt thinking about the features of genres, platforms, and interfaces that guide and constrain representations of identity—for example, see Morrison, “Facebook and Coaxed Affordances.”

18 Poletti, “Auto/Assemblage.”

19 Espenshied and Lialina, One Terabyte. A group calling themselves “The Archive Team” launched the GeoCities project following Yahoo’s announcement that it was shutting the service down. The GeoCities project aimed to capture as much information as possible from the GeoCities servers before they went offline. The Archive Team managed to save a large portion of the GeoCities data, later making it available to anyone in the form of a 650 gigabyte torrent. See Archive Team, “GeoCities.” 

20 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 220–222.

21 Khagram and Levitt, “Constructing Transnational Studies,” 10–11.

22 Jay, “Introduction,” 6.

23 Chansky, “Introduction,” 8.

24 Gupta, “Song.”

25 Jay, “Introduction,” 1–2.

26 Jay, 4.

27 Smith and Watson, “Life Narrative,” 2–3.

28 I borrow this phrasing from Vertovec and Cohen, Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism, iv.

29 Gilmore, “Introduction,” 3.

30 Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives, 70.

31 Schaffer and Smith, “Introduction,” 3.

32 Whitlock, “Introduction,” 3–4.

33 Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography,” 122; Whitlock, “Introduction,” 7; Jay, “Introduction,” 4.

34 Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography,” 122, as well as Kadar et al.’s concept of “autobiographical traces.” See Perreault and Kadar, “Introduction,” 2.

35 Whitlock, “Introduction,” 14; Schaffer and Smith, “Introduction,” 5.

36 Jolly, “Introduction,” 10.

37 Whitlock, “Introduction,” 7.

38 “The CI 9s constitute the first mass use of identification photography in Canada and tracked the movements of thousands of Chinese migrants in the early half of the twentieth century.” See Mass Capture.

39 As we shared Cho’s project and response with Graham, the latter generously brought to our attention an Australian project, Invisible Australians: Living under the White Australia Policy, led by historian of Chinese Australia Kate Bagnall and digital historian Tim Sherratt. Bagnall and Sherratt’s project, like Cho’s, digitizes and makes available government records of people affected by Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act (known more commonly as the White Australia Policy, in effect from 1901 to the 1970s). In our minds, the similarities between the projects and their shared histories and legacies of British colonization in Canada and Australia alike strengthen Graham’s argument regarding the effects of the digital turn on the restoration of transnational lives into cultural memory and the transforming role of the biographer.