Trans Narratives

Recently, "trans" has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. 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." Trans is also an adjective when it is part of a word that signifies an identity or expression. Trans has worked as an adjective to destabilize established ideas about gender as it makes new senses of what gender can mean for trans people.

Much of the study of life writing is about the study of identity and the possibilities for lives that stories of identity make possible. In that spirit, Trans Narratives: trans, transmedia, transnational represents an opportunity for critical work about life writing by trans people to be featured, as it seeks to interrogate the idea of trans in multiple registers, bringing a prefix to the center of the current field of life-writing studies. It aims 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.

The Chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Introduction
Unfixing the Prefix in Life-Writing Studies: Trans, Transmedia, Transnational
Ana Horvat, Orly Lael Netzer, Sarah McRae and Julie Rak
Essays
1. Becoming Culturally (Un)intelligible: Exploring the Terrain of Trans Life Writing
Evan Vipond
2. Posttranssexual Temporalities: Negotiating Canonical Memoir Narratives in Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw and Juliet Jacques's Trans
Chiara Pellegrini
3. Examining Trans Narratives in the Wake of Norway's Gender Recognition Law
france rose hartline
4. Against a Single Story: Diverse Trans* Narratives in Autobiographical Documentary Film
Sarah Ray Rondot
5. Transnational Digital Biography: The Forgetting and Remembering of Winifred Atwell
Pamela Graham
Critical Response
6. The Afterlives of Stars, Known and Unknown
Lily Cho
How Would You Teach It?
7. Potential for Healing and Harm: Teaching Trans Narratives to Trans Students
Erica Chu
8. Learning to Listen: The Power of Transnational Life Storytelling
Leila Moayeri Pazargadi
What's Next?
9. What's Next is the Past
Lucas Crawford