From

Abstract

Transgender lives and identities have gained considerable popular notoriety in the past decades. As part of this wider visibility, dominant narratives regarding the “transgender experience” have surfaced in both the community itself and the wider public. Perhaps the most prominent of these narratives define transgender people as those living in the “wrong body” for their true gender identity. While a popular and powerful story, the wrong body narrative has been criticized as limited, not representing the experience of all transgender people, and valorized as the only legitimate identifier of transgender status. The dominance of this narrative has been challenged through the proliferation of alternate narratives of transgender identity, largely through transgender people telling their own stories, which has the potential to complicate and expand the social understanding of what it means to be transgender for both trans- and cisgender communities. I focus on transgender literature as a point of entrance into the changing narratives of transgender identity and experience. This work addresses two main questions: What are the stories being told by trans lit? and What are the stories being told about trans literature? What follows is a series of separate, yet linked chapters exploring the contours of transgender literature, largely through the context of the Lambda Literary Awards over the past twenty years. Chapter 2 explores the changing definitions of transgender literature in popular discourse over the last two decades. Drawing on a data set of 51 articles, interviews, book reviews, and blog posts published from 1997-2017, I present a framework for defining and categorizing transgender literature. This framework lays out the different possibilities of what transgender literature might be using the three variables of content, authorship, audience, as well as the likelihood of each iteration being included in the definition of transgender literature as understood in the popular conversation. My findings in this chapter suggest a changing definition of transgender literature from “telling transgender/transition stories” to a focus on “transgender people telling stories.” Chapter 3 moves from conversations defining trans literature to an exploration of how texts within transgender literature have changed over time. Using the finalist and winners in the Lambda Literary Award transgender categories, I constructed a sample of transgender literature covering the past two decades, from 1997-2016. Using digital textual analysis methods, I identify various “demographic” trends in transgender literature since 1997, which mirror the trend identified in chapter 3, a shift from “telling transgender stories” focused largely on identity and transition processes to “transgender people telling stories” which rely much less on transition and identity as central themes. Chapter 4 attempts to contextualize these shifts identified in chapters 2 and 3 by situating trans literature in a broader socio-historical context. I frame transgender literature as an intellectual movement situated in an intellectual opportunity structure that includes the publishing industry, LGBT social activism and organizations, and the Lambda Literary Awards themselves. Lambda Literary functions here as a primary gatekeeper for understanding transgender literature in a broader intellectual community around LGBT cultural production, which transitions us to thinking more critically about the Lambda Literary Awards in chapter 5. Chapter 5 introduces us more fully to the Lambda Literary Awards, the largest LGBT book awards in North America, and positions them as a claim for LGBT cultural citizenship in the United States. Using archival documents from the Lambda Literary Foundation, as well as published statements and articles about the Lambda Literary Awards, I explore three conflicts and controversies within the LGBT community through the localized claims for cultural citizenship made on the Lammys. Finally, I provide a brief conclusion, which recaps the main findings of each chapter, sketches my tentative hopes for the future of transgender literature, and outlines my recommendations for future research in this area.