Storying South African Trans Lives As Activism

Abstract

Trans life writing in South Africa remains scarce, underexplored and under-researched. Yet scholarly engagement with this nascent modality has the potential not only to contribute to thinking around auto/biographical narration, but to change the lives of transgender people by improving society’s understanding of trans lived experience. This article argues for a range of even more othered, more precarious South African trans narratives to be included within the emergent body of trans life accounts, where conventionally published, full-length memoirs by writers such as Anastacia Thompson and Landa Mabenge are given visibility and could perhaps be seen to emphasise more normative elements of transitioning. This study advocates for informal, unpublished, ongoing, processual forms of life narration, such as conversational encounter and anecdote, which often foreground ideas of trans representation and transitioning as ongoing trans-ing,1 rather than popularly dominant, medicalised narratives of before-and-after surgery, pre-op and post-transition. The use of a fragmented, pluritextual approach to the subject matter and episodic recounting of trans lives disrupts transnormative narratives and their conceptual linearity; arguing for forms of trans life narration that connect ‘the self’ to a community that is variously evidenced and constantly in process, present and yet constantly under threat of erasure. This is “an interpretive strategy allowing for reading lives preserved only fragmentarily, in ephemeral form.”2 This strategy surfaces alternative trans life narration, potentially as a form of activism that transgresses dominant discourses on transitioning by attending to the everyday actions of trans people. Drawing on Paul B. Preciado’s activist trans life writing, we reposition ordinary trans South Africans as agents of change, who “burrow in and virally disrupt the smoothness and closure on which” dominant trans discourses of becoming depend.³ The tumultuous political history of South Africa positions trans narratives as catalysts for change, with the transformative power to challenge institutional practices that oppress marginalised identities based on gender and sexual orientation. Trans people deliberately write themselves into the country’s history and political legacy. This strategy aims to work towards greater inclusivity for trans people when seeking to add/redress the wrongs committed against the community.