Vulnerability and the (im)possibilities of becoming: transgenderism in contemporary South African life writing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite increasing engagement with queer theory and its literature in African scholarship, representations of transgenderism have received very little attention, relegating transgender identity to the margins of critical debates informing African queer discourses. Considering that, this article reads two transgender memoirs from South Africa – Landa Mabenge’s Becoming Him: A, Trans Memoir of Triumph and Anastacia Tomson’s Always Anastacia: A Transgender Life in South Africa – as acts of engagement fostering recognition of the vulnerability of transgender identities on the continent. These memoirs represent transgender lives in South Africa as precarious lives due to mainstream culture’s denial of the authenticity of transgender identity. As such, despite being granted constitutional liberties, transgender people in South Africa still find themselves at the margins of society and at risk of violence. The memoirs demonstrate the power of narrative agency in disrupting normative social discourses on queerness in mitigating the vulnerability of transgender subjects in cultures that have negated them.