Narrative and the Re/production of Transsexual: The Foreclosure of an Endured Emergence of Gender Multiplicity

Abstract

In some autobiographical narratives, transsexual has been narrated outside the gender binary. These narratives have the propensity to reconceptualize multiplicity of genders. However, the re/production of transsexual appears not only to be a function of how the subject position is represented but also a function of the structure of narrative. If this is so, then the following questions arise: What is the relation between the representation of a subject position in a narrative and the structure of narrative? and how does this relation function in the re/production of transsexual and gender multiplicity? In an analysis of one autobiographical interview, the author reads male-to-female transsexual as a subject position grounded in dichotomous gender that was disrupted only where ambiguity is allowed in the narrative structure, and this disruption was foreclosed through how the subject was represented and/or the structure of the narrative.