Trans Novels

Trans Novels

In Trans of Color Critique before Transexuality, Peterson argues “that gender and transgender have “always been racial categories.”

Susan Stryker argues that the splashy mainstream media attention of Christine Jorgensen engendered transness as a racial category; “It is not Jorgensen’s pale skin or Scandinavian-American cultural heritage that made her white, ”argues Stryker, “but rather the processes through which her presence racializes others while rendering opaque her own racialization”(81–82).

For my archival collection, I wanted to show how transness was represented in the mid 20th century via the medium of Pulp books. Pulps, as defined by the Library of Congress; “are cheap, portable, disposable, and often sensational. This genre flourished from the 1920's to the 1950's.”

These pulps execute a similar function described by Stryker and Peterson: they render opaque their own racialization; transness is being described as something exclusively for middle-class, white, heteronormative aspiring individuals. These ideas were spread to a massive audience due to the accessible nature of pulps.

In Goldberg’s article (Trans) Sex Sells, they posit that “The lack of investment in Black trans subjectivity is not surprising in sleaze, but it does stand in contrast to concerted efforts to give white trans characters fertile—if single-minded—inner lives.”

In this queer archive, I seek to visiblize the invisible processes that made transness a racial category. I have attached pictures of 3 extremely popular pulps: Half, made in 1953, Man into Woman, published in the 50s, and conundrum published in 1974. These pulps, in contrast to Goldberg’s exploration of more sexually explicit pulps, surround the emerging genre category of trans memoir. Each of these books is increasingly hard to locate, and I found them at the Fisher Rare Book Library.

I included audio excerpts of interesting parts of the novels which illustrate my hope – each of the subjects of these books is someone who enjoyed some sort of higher status in society – which garnered them enough reputation to be able to publish the book in the first place. Therefore, many of the experiences in the book depict the experiences of upper-class individuals. While looking at these books, it is important to ask, why were only white individuals allowed the privilege for a “single minded” inner life that could be mass published?