‘Oh, honey, we’re all transgender’: the Journey towards Trans Subjectivity in US Fiction for Teens (original) (raw)

Abstract

The author of Geography Club (2003), Brent Hartinger, argues that LGBTI fiction in the United States has moved beyond its preoccupation with identity and coming out, and now includes characters who just happen to be gay (Hartinger 2009). He is defining his own practice as a writer accurately enough, but it's not true to say that the coming out novel for teens is dead-or that it should be. Every young person's experience of coming to terms with his or her sexuality is unique, but before we assume that acknowledging LGBTI sexuality is no longer a problem, we need to remember that it can still be a matter of life and death in an increasing number of communities. Namaste (2011) calls on academics to continue to make the invisible lives of transgender people, in particular, visible by focusing on the alarming facts of their homelessness, their suffering of poor health and violent crime, and the tragic rate of transgender suicide. It is too comfortable for theorists such as Butler (1990) and Garber (1991) to focus on LGBTI as merely contesting intellectual constructions of gender. For Namaste the function of discourse about diversity is to achieve social justice. The list of titles that feature LGBTI subjects for teens published in the United States over the past 15 years is quite remarkable, although Milne (2013) is cautious about the sanitised image of reality that is constructed in many of these texts. The narrative of 'progress, self-discovery and acceptance', as she sees it, is mostly positioned within the white middle class with supportive families, and the fiction sanitises 'some of the harsher lived realities of queer youth, who are at a much higher risk of suicide, homelessness and substance abuse than their heterosexual counterparts' (2013, p. 177). Milne argues that it sanitises lived urban experiences to a degree that fiction about heterosexual teens does not. In asking why that might be, we need to understand first who the implied readers of LGBTI fiction are. The cost of the books tells us, if nothing else does, that enthusiasm for

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