"He Has Made Us All Look Unreal": Strange(r)ness in Jackie Kay's "Trumpet" (1998)

Abstract

This article analyses, from the perspective of gender and affect theory, the representation of Joss Moody, the deceased protagonist of Jackie Kay’s debut novel, Trumpet (1998). This work centres around the portrayal of the transgender stranger, as delineated by those characters who represent the legal and medical discourses during a series of posthumous strange encounters. For that purpose, this article combines close reading techniques with an interdisciplinary theoretical approach to the selected novel, where intersectional perspectives allow for the examination of the literary text. Firstly, I offer an examination of Sara Ahmed’s contemporary theory of strange(r)ness, as well as her model of the sociality of emotion, with a special focus on the model of the stickiness of disgust. This theoretical framework is then applied to the literary analysis of Trumpet, which rests on the juxtaposition of Joss’s (mis)representation, based on the discrepancy between his female birth sex and his lived masculinity.