Introduction to Struggle and Hustle: Trans and Queer Nonfiction Prose

Abstract

ABSTRACT Trans and queer people have long both been written about and written about themselves in popular nonfiction prose. Indeed, nonfiction prose’s sense of immediacy and materiality insists on self-defined reality of people who challenge conventional notions of gender, sexuality, gender expression, race, disability, class, geography, size, immigration status, and employment—daring to imagine what a thriving self and community can look like. In exploring this body of work as well as the bodies in this work, the vital scholarship of each article takes up the issue’s theme by affirming, in unexpected and shifting ways, that, for queer and trans writers, the struggle has always been real and the hustle has always been deep.