Chapter 4 - Breaking the Binaries

Summary

Chapter 4 analyses recent writing by and about trans people with a twofold aim: to examine how they challenge binary thinking, and to explore their understanding of how gender identity interacts with and is circumscribed by heteropatriarchal capitalist institutions and norms. I examine how Juliet Jacques’ Trans: A Memoir (2015) and ‘Weekend in Brighton’ (2015), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) abandon the tradition within earlier trans life-writing of focusing upon transition as the dramatic apex of the narrative. In different manners, all of these writers are arguing for an expansion of the term ‘trans’. In the case of Nelson and Preciado this extends, controversially, to name other states of flux, such as the pregnant female body or the flow of information and data. This chapter examines these audacious attempts to both naturalise and expand ‘trans’, as well as Jacques’s dedramatizing prose, arguing that these writers testify to a new twenty-first-century understanding of gender identity from which feminism, social behaviour, and societal organisation can be reappraised.