"The way you wave your hat": performativity and self-invention in Jackie Kay's "Trumpet" and Duncan Tucker's "Transamerica"

Kay's "Trumpet" and Tucker's "Transamerica" make explicit use of transgender subjects to deal with the intricate and hybrid nature of identity. These characters dismantle their surrounding universe where family choices and social identifications can be no longer predetermined. Likewise, as paradigmatic queer texts, both stories transgress conventional categories and paradoxically, their epistemological collapse turns into a powerful source of meaning, inasmuch as those categories -sex, gender, nationality, race, family, genealogy- are eventually confronted with their own contingency and their openness for new meanings. Through the exploration of overt themes as adoption, jazz, nomadism and transsexuality -which work also as powerful metaphors for the fluidity and precariousness of the Self- these authors align themselves with the performativity paradigm in their assumption that identity must be invented and reinvented. In this context, the transgender subject becomes the epitome of instability and diasporic meaning, generating a scenario of ambiguity which invites alternative ways of coping with subjectivity

Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold

In her article “Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold,” Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo discusses how the autobiographical accounts of the conflict by Vera Brittain, Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, inspired by their experiences as voluntary nurses in the front, deconstruct the meanings of femininity, masculinity and patriotism, contesting the official rhetoric of passivity that defined the role of women in World War I. Their extreme engagement with the precariousness and vulnerability of others elicits an empathic response that can be interpreted through Judith Butler (2004; 2009), Emmanuel Lévinas (1969) and Alan Badiou’s (1993) ethics of alterity. Against the abstract assumptions of honor and heroism in many male war accounts, these women’s face-to-face encounter with the suffering bodies impels them to an intersubjective relation defined by sensibility and affectivity. Their exposure to the limits of (in)humanity implies a drive towards commonality that cannot be overlooked and suggests a gendered intervention in the body politic in which the war/peace, front/home binaries are necessarily redefined. Their texts are also “bodies in transit” inasmuch as they move between Victorian conventional order and a sense of Modernist fragmentariness evoking the distorted anatomies of the combatants they nursed and signaling a clear interaction between war, gender and experimental writing. Re-visiting Brittain, Bagnold and Borden from the critical perspectives of the Ethical Turn and Trauma Studies is essential for a reconceptualization of war and of the intricacies of its representation

Feminist/queer/diasporic temporality in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019)

Claiming that individuals and communities get their choices, rhythms and practices biopolitically choreographed by temporal mechanisms that dictate which human experiences are included or excluded, Elizabeth Freeman states that those ‘whose activities do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often simultaneously black, female, queer’ (2005). The narrative subject of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019) is black, female and (mostly) queer in her design of a polyphonic text featuring twelve black women moving through the world in different decades and occupying a temporal dimension that deviates from the linear and teleological modes. I draw on Edelman (2004); Freeman (2010) and Ahmed (2010, 2017) to analyse Evaristo’s novel as a text informed by feminist queer temporality and thus explore these characters’ resistance to chrononormative assumptions like ‘the straight time of domesticated gender, capital accumulation, and national coherence’ (Ramberg, 2016). In this light, I address her cast of ‘time abjects’ –lesbians, transgender women, feminist killjoys and menopausal females—as characterized ‘chronotopically’ as their racialized and gendered subjectivities coalesce temporally and spatially seeing their pasts and futures interact in a typically transpositional, queer and diasporic continuum. By invoking Freeman’s notion of ‘erotohistoriography’ (2010) as a distinctive mode of queer time that not only recognizes non-linear chronopolitics, but decidedly prioritizes bodies and pleasures in self-representation, I contend that Evaristo depicts bodies as likewise performing this encounter between past and present in hybrid, carnal and trans-temporal terms. I conclude that in her joining temporality and corporeality, memory and desire, she suggests alternative ways of representing contemporary black British womanhoo