Reterritorialize, Baby

Abstract

ABSTRACT: “Reterritorialize, Baby,” is an investigation of Torrey Peters’s recent novel, arguably the most popular novel written in the English language by and about a transgender person. This inquiry breaks down the novel according to a new conception of minor literature, borrowing some of the basic structure of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s original design, while considering the specific ways in which trans minor literature challenges not only heteronormative conceptions of identity, epistemology, and labor, but also the ways in which each of these is built into the tradition of the Western novel in modes that reflect phobic public conceptions of family, community, progress, and work. The article works through a series of deterritorializations and ultimately proposes that some of the work Detransition, Baby does is actually that of reterritorialization: remapping, extracting, and subsequently proposing new and disidentifying contexts and frames for subjects. Whether these reterritorializations represent a “new frontier” for fiction or an alternative manner of subject formation and narrative construction, trans minor literature is at a tipping point, presenting some of the most varied and incisive literature being generated on this continent today. This inquiry offers a hermeneutic for considering both one of its landmark works and its future prospects.