Theoretical Framework and Critical Reflections
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Queer x Trans Memoir: In Sight of an Embodied History
Memoir List:
A Year Without A Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham
Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia
Apples and Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity by Jan Clausen
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
Native Country of the Heart by Cherrie Moraga
Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome
Redefining Realness by Janet Mock
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
INTRODUCTION
The categories through which we have used to describe sexuality in the United States are a product of historical exigency; they are not ubiquitous across cultures. As Nikki Sullivan so beautifully describes, “categories for defining particular kinds of relationships and practices are culturally and historically specific and have not operated in all cultures at all times” (1). My research is an attempt to explore the nature and function of these categories.
Despite the non-transhistorical nature of these categories, I am interested in analyzing the internal experiences that underly the constitution of the categories that exist in the United States. I am intrigued by the uncharacterized space between a queer person’s experience and the identity they may choose to assume or avoid within their culture. And in turn, I am interested in how these identity categories and the communities they created have influenced the life trajectories of queer individuals.
A vast body of theory on sexuality is in circulation; however, the body of work on the lived materiality of queer experiences is minute in comparison. This project looks at lived experiences to put theory to the test, highlighting discrepancies between theory and practice while adding definition and texture to queer theories. My work analyzes twelve memoirs written by queer and trans* individuals to provide insight into queer and trans lived experiences.
Utilizing the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, I begin by drawing a crucial distinction between the signifier and the signified aspects of a concrete identity category that a person may identify with. A sexual identity category itself, a label—such as gay or straight—works as a signifier, whereas the concept or feeling that the label represents, the meaning attached—which is the internal experience of having certain gendered or sexual preferences—is signified.
I must underscore the importance of this distinction, as it draws a clear boundary in terms of the difference between the label we assign a phenomenon and the phenomenon itself. In terms of sexual identities, simply altering an identity category—a signifier—does not abolish the signified experience that it represents. The linguistic sign used to designate such identity categories must be understood as separate from the experience itself. This understanding creates space for critical examination of these categories while validating the concrete experiences they represent.
I undertake a process of denaturalizing identity to reveal its frameworks. Within these memoirs, I am interested in the terminology with which the authors purposefully identify themselves in tandem with the lived experiences they inhabit. In other words, “to denaturalise either homosexuality or heterosexuality is not to minimise the significance of those categories, but to ask that they be contextualized or historicized rather than assumed as natural, purely descriptive terms” (Jagose 18).
With this understanding, theorists who problematize identity categories, like Judith Butler, can be interpreted more clearly. In the frequently cited Gender Trouble, Butler asserts, “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (34). This situates key components of Butler’s theory of gender performativity, one of the most widely-known aspects of queer theory. According to Butler, there is no essential nature or absolute core of gender; instead, gender is born from a series of repeated actions and expressions that, if repeated frequently enough, come to be understood as natural and innate.
However, a common critique of Butler’s work is its inability to describe or represent lived experience. Jay Prosser, John Champagne, and Martha Nussbaum all take up this issue in their work (McCann & Monaghan 134). Butler’s theory does not offer insight into the ways in which queer and trans individuals understand and live out their own identities. In Second Skins, Prosser utilizes transsexual autobiographies to highlight the irrelevance of Butler’s theory to trans lives, specifically the fact that Butler’s theory does not acknowledge the materiality of lived experience and does not comprehend gender identity as an innate desire: “One is not born a woman, but nevertheless may become one – given substantial medical intervention, personal tenacity, economic security, social support, and so on: becoming woman, in spite of not being born one, may be seen as a crucial goal (65).
Similarly, my work builds on an attempt to reconcile Butler’s theory with a selection of queer and trans memoirs to account for real-life phenomena. I expand Butler’s ideas to account for sexuality as well as gender. I argue that Butler’s theory does not account for innate preferences: whether these preferences be towards specific gender presentation, physical body anatomy, sexual orientation and gender of object choice, or self-image and gender identity. I am not arguing against Butler's theory; instead, I am interrogating a site of one of its limitations. Rather than solely focusing solely on trans* individuals like Prosser, my work analyzes twelve memoirs by queer and trans individuals. The genre of memoir specifically allows for analysis into the thoughts and minds of these individuals, allowing for a deeper understanding of a person’s full being underneath the label.
I aim to discover points of reconciliation between Butler’s theories and lived experience. McCann and Monaghan argue that such reconciliation is necessary: “The difficult question of negotiating identity within queer theory is an ongoing area of discussion and debate” (157). This debate on how to negotiate identity within a queer theoretical framework is a problem that this project concerns itself with: How can gender be both performative and innate? And, how can sexual orientation categories at once be both a social construction and a fundamental reality?
In the process of locating these points of reconciliation, I propel the notion of identity as not only innate but also relational to the forefront of the discussion: “Transgender may indeed be considered a term of relationality; it describes not simply an identity but a relation between people, within a community, or within intimate bonds” (Halberstam 49). In other words, identity does not need to be a pure essence in order to be real; this concept can be extended to queer identities as well as trans identities. We do not exist in a vacuum, and therefore, the social realities around us have the power to construct and influence reality and who we are just as much as genetics. In fact, genes can often change and grow in response to environmental changes. In his book Assemblage Theory—a work building on the original idea presented by Deleuze and Guattari—Manuel De Landa explains how the essence of an organism is not all that matters; the organism’s successive interactions and engagements with other substances will determine its identity as well: “As biological organisms and as social agents we live our lives within spaces delimited by natural and artificial extensive boundaries…the defining boundaries of our own bodies – our skin, our organs’ outer surfaces, the membranes of our cells – inhabiting these bounded extensive spaces is part of what defines our social and biological identities” (110). In turn, when it comes to queer identity, I use theories of assemblage not to uncover an essence but to acknowledge how social interactions and environment will inevitably shape identity—essence aside.
Above all else, this project aims to validate the experience of the memoirs I read while analyzing the influence of identity. There must be a path leading toward the reconciliation of the apparent contradiction between identity as totally essential and identity as relational—gender/queerness as performative and gender/queerness as innate—and this work seeks to excavate that path.
WHY MEMOIR?
The genre of memoir provides a platform to explore my inquiry questions:
- What kinds of internal experiences do individuals have which may prompt them to identify with a particular sexual or gender identity?
- What constitutes queerness?
- What are some characteristics of queer identities?
- How have gender and sexuality labels and categories in and of themselves shaped and affected, for better or for worse, tangible lived experiences?
- How do people from differing social, religious, or racial identity groups experience their queer or trans* identity differently?
"When I look back at my childhood, I often say I always knew I was a girl since the age of three or four…When I say I always knew I was a girl with such certainty, I erase all the nuances, the work, the process of self-discovery. I’ve adapted to saying I always knew I was a girl as a defense against the louder world…I wielded this ever-knowing, all-encompassing certainty to protect my identity. I’ve since sacrificed it in an effort to stand firmly in the murkiness of my shifting self-truths" (Mock 16).
Mock clarifies that she has often resorted to saying that she always knew she was a girl with full certainty as a matter of defense: to protect her identity from those who may view any kind of complexity, fluidity, or uncertainty as chinks within her armor. McCann and Monaghan explain how “a ‘wrong body’ discourse (the idea that trans identity is simply about being born into an incorrect body)...has been reiterated in medical gatekeeping around trans identity” (171). For decades the ‘wrong body’ narrative was the kind of story that trans people were required to recount in order to receive the medical treatment they needed. It’s no wonder that this is the most prevalent narrative circulating on the surface of our culture and the story that feels the safest for Mock to recount; it has enabled trans people to receive treatment the treatment they needed. But the memoir allows Mock to tell her full story to those who wish to listen, outside of the unnuanced automatic response of the ‘wrong body’ story.
Similarly, in Cyrus Grace Dunham’s memoir A Year Without A Name, they explain, “My confession of utter transness sacrificed nuance for legibility. I defaulted to the trope that I was born in the wrong body…But I didn’t have time to be rigorous. I just needed them to believe me. At least, enough for me to believe myself” (145). Cyrus explicitly described a sacrifice of “nuance for legibility.” They furnished a known trope to gain increased credibility, wielding the corroboration of a known story. So perhaps, what Cyrus has always needed is simply…more time to explain who they truly are. And through the memoir, Cyrus does exactly that. The memoir’s length and form are one of its greatest assets, permitting the channeling of nuance within stereotypical stories to uncover deeper and quantifiably more truths.
The similar experiences of both Janet Mock and Cyrus Grace Dunham—they both resorted to the narrative trope of identity essentialism to gain validity—also mirror the historical exigency for the reasons out of which identity categories were born in the first place.
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that the concept of homosexuality as an identity did not exist prior to 1870 when Karl Westphal published an article depicting homosexuality as a character trait rather than purely an act. Before 1870, same-sex acts were largely criminalized under sodomy laws (Foucault 43). The designation of homosexuality as a type of person and an identity was a historical breakthrough, allowing for the political mobilization of homosexuality, successively leading to civil rights and the retraction of many sodomy laws (McCann &Monaghan 36). Annamarie Jagose explains, “The essentialist claim that some people are born homosexual has been used in anti-homophobic attempts to secure civil rights-based recognition for homosexuals” (9). The characterization of homosexuality as a species was historically advantageous in the fight for civil rights; in this case, the claim of homosexuality being a total essence was necessary in order to achieve important civil liberties.
But is this true? Is queerness really purely an essence and completely innate, or does it behave differently?
PART 1: ASSEMBLAGE: IDENTITY AS RELATIONAL
“And in that moment, as in the first night when I held her, I felt myself pass beyond childhood, a woman connecting with other women in an intricate, complex, and ever-widening network of exchanging strengths”
—Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde
In his book Assemblage Theory, Manuel De Landa presents an idea central to my analysis, describing how some identities come into being purely through relation: “Some relations, such as that between parents and their offspring, or those between brothers and sisters, define the very identity of the terms that they relate. One can only be a father if one is related genealogically to a son or a daughter, and vice versa, so that the identity of the role of father, or of that son or daughter, cannot exist outside their mutual relation” (2). Although one can only become a father through a relation, this does not mean that a father is not real. There are similarities among the experiences of fathers, a kind of thread binding the experiences of fathers together, deeming the phenomenon worthy of the label and the concept attached. There need not be an essence of the category of father in order for the experience it describes to hold weight. Similarly, when it comes to queer identities, there need not be an essence of the category of queer or trans in order for the experience it represents to hold weight. If one were to analyze the experiences of fathers, one might find a set of similarities across numerous experiences. Likewise, if one were to analyze the experiences of queer and trans individuals, one might find a set of similarities across numerous experiences as well. Without relying on essence for validity, there remains a kind of thread weaving together shared experiences, which denotes the category of queer and trans. But where is this path located?
Theories of assemblage can help circle the rim of this path. Viewing the LGBTQIA+ community as a local assemblage is extremely fruitful when trying to understand queer identity. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define an assemblage as “A multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagious, epidemics, the wind” (Deleuze and Parnet 69).
To better understand the nature of an assemblage, one must also understand what an assemblage is not: “An assemblage is not a set of predetermined parts (such as the pieces of a plastic model aeroplane) that are then put together in order or into an already-conceived structure (the model aeroplane). Nor is an assemblage a random collection of things, since there is a sense that an assemblage is a whole of some sort that expresses some identity and claims a territory” (Stivale 77). In other words, members of an assemblage have certain similar properties that render them able to be classified together.
One can think of an assemblage as a number of diverse elements that contain a set of common properties that express a particular kind of relations. In the field of geology, an assemblage refers to a “‘group of fossils that, appearing together, characterizer a particular stratum’ (‘Assemblage’ n.d.)” (Stivale 77). Although the fossils are different, they can be classified as a group since they share similarities with each other. This “collection of things and their relations expresses something, a particular character…the elements that make up an assemblage also include the qualities present (large, poisonous, find, blinding, etc.) and the affects and effectivity of the assemblage: that is, not just what it is, but what it can do (ATP: 257)” (Stivale 78).
Therefore, while trying to understand what a queer identity is, one must simultaneously analyze what a queer identity can do: how it functions. This is where conceptualizing identity as relational comes into play; identity labels play an active role in community-building and help to establish political traction. The actions that these identity labels propel are equally up for analysis in understanding queer lives. Therefore, while analyzing the following memoirs, I examine not only the label itself but also the effect that designating oneself as a particular gender or sexuality label entails.
Reading queerness as an assemblage, I argue that discovering the qualities that coalesce across many queer memoirs can lend insight into understanding the characteristics and structure of the assemblage itself. This is the lens through which I uncover what a queer identity is, or, what it looks like.
In a cross-analysis of the twelve memoirs in this project, I discovered a number of thematic commonalities or symbols across them. These symbols—which I highlight in the following sections—can be read to better understand the characteristics and properties of the assemblage of queerness, and therefore queer identities, as a whole.
Characteristics of the Assemblage of Queerness
GENDER (DIS) IDENTIFICATION
My study is composed of an analysis of twelve memoirs. One common characteristic across the majority of these memoirs surrounds a level of dysphoria and lack of identification with normative gender presentations. This is unsurprising in terms of trans-identifying writers, but my findings suggest that many cisgender-identifying queer writers have gender-nonconforming feelings or experiences as well. This suggests that the instability of gender is a common characteristic of queer individuals, although by no means all-encompassing or universal.
The following two examples depict queer relationships within the concept of gender roles. In her memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde describes the multiplicity of her self: “I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me” (7). Although Lorde identifies as a woman, she is aware of the role that gender plays and questions the rigidity of these roles. Similarly, Cherrie Moraga in Native Country of the Heart explains, “I am a woman who knew myself daughter and son at once—a protector and provider for women and children” (10). The blurry duality between genders is broken down even among cis-identifying queer writers. Both of these writers demonstrate a permeable relationship to gender.
Gendered experiences like those of queer individuals are of course present—and far more powerful and intense—amongst trans writers. The experiences of trans writers go far beyond simply a discomfort or nonconformity with gender. Their feelings are intense and significant, impacting many aspects of their lives. Trans writers tend to have a higher level of bodily gendered disidentification. In their memoir A Year Without A Name, Cyrus Grace Dunham expresses that “The bigger my breasts got, the more I wanted my body to shrink. That only seemed possible through deprivation. The game was to get so hungry that I was dizzy and stay in the dizziness” (17). The intensity of this “bodily claustrophobia” (Dunham 17) that Dunham describes often becomes severe and can result in mental and psychological distress.
Additionally, in Redefining Realness, Janet Mock communicates a desire to become a girl: “My desire to step across the chasm that separated me from the girls—the ones who put their sandals in the red cubbyholes…rose inside me…grew taller and bolder” (16). The specific desire here to become a girl is absent from non-trans experiences. This is the precise point that Prosser makes in Second Skins: “One is not born a woman, but nevertheless may become one – given substantial medical intervention, personal tenacity, economic security, social support, and so on: becoming woman, in spite of not being born one, may be seen as a crucial goal (65). Essence or not, normative expectations for sexuality and gender identity hold immense weight in our society, and trans individuals feel an extreme sense of alienation from them. Constructed as the surface labels may be, the experiences of queer and trans people who live in opposition to them unarguably exist and must be accounted for.
But if queer writers often feel a lack of identification with the expected cultural gender presentation, what about the trans writers? What differentiates a queer-identified experience or a trans-identified one?
The explicit desire to embody a particular social category or physical embodiment, as well as a deep desire to perceived a certain way by others, appear to be a few characteristics that often differentiate trans individuals from cis and queer individuals.
In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson demonstrates how simply having a certain anatomical structure, or even being on hormones, doesn’t necessarily result in a given and consistent label: “For some, ‘transitioning’ may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t?” (65). There is no single set of characteristics exclusive to each category that will inevitably fall into a particular sexuality or gender identity; it often differs from person to person, and the same feeling/experience can be interpreted in infinite ways.
An unconventional relationship to gendered expectations is also apparent in the memoirs of Saeed Jones and Brian Broome. In How We Fight For Our Lives, Saeed Jones explains that “Well into high school, in all these dreams I had the body of a girl. The kind of girl I thought these guys would sleep with” (41). Although Saeed does not identify as trans, this experience demonstrates the malleability of gender and how queerness can embody gender transgression as well as transness. However, Saeed never expresses the desire to be a girl, which is a key differentiator between the experiences of queer and trans individuals. Likewise, in Punch Me Up to the Gods, Broome recounts an experience that he presents as “I would creep stealthily toward the women’s clothing section. I would do so knowing somewhere deep down that it was wrong. It wasn’t exactly like I wanted to wear girls’ clothes. It was just that girls’ clothes were so much more interesting. But I knew deep down that it was wrong. I had been told several times by both my parents and I knew especially that my father didn’t like it” (348). Although Brian does not identify as trans, he experiences a certain level of departure from the gendered norms of the time period. He explicitly says that he doesn’t want to wear girl clothes, and does not desire to be a girl. This also differentiates his queer experience from a trans one.
Based on the experiences of these queer writers, a worthwhile conjecture may be that occupying a queer space in itself tends to result in a more transgressive relationship to gender than heterosexual persons. And, lived accounts by trans individuals confirm that feeling alienated with one’s expected gender at birth is a real phenomenon, resulting in concrete thoughts and feelings, many of which are emotionally intense.
NAMING
Manuel De Landa explains that “any assemblage component is characterized both by its properties and its capacities” (52). One component for an analysis of these memoirs’ properties and capacities surrounds the motif of naming. Names play a significant role in these memoirs. Janet Mock appreciates that “there’s a power in naming yourself, in proclaiming to the world that this is who you are” (144). For queer and trans people, this power is essential. Especially amongst trans memoirists, a name change is a vital means of stepping into one’s own truth and identity.
The power to name oneself is something that queer people have not historically been afforded. For most of human history, the discourse around homosexuality was determined by the church or medical institutions. Carmen Maria Machado captures the vexed nature of names: “Sometimes, your tongue is removed…sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what—not who—you are” (37). The ability to name oneself, rather than be named by others, is something that queer and trans individuals do not take for granted. Names designated outside of oneself can be restrictive. Jan Clausen contests the limitations of such designations: “I’ve fretted over the implications of names that authorized or entrapped me” (381). Names have power; queer and trans individuals are especially aware of the power that names hold.
A name is more than a linguistic label, a material property. A name serves a very specific function: “The purpose of a name is simple: we require a stable identity so that we can be known. I can’t write about my name without writing about being known—the desire to be known, the disdain for and fear of desire” (Dunham 115). This stability is what the trans-name-changing troubles. It indicates a shift of the self; it is more than just a name. That name is part of a journey, and it can even become identity-forming.
The phenomenon of trans writers changing their names is an event that some find frightening; the very notion of the possibility that a name can change destabilizes the certainty of names. Yet perhaps this is indicative of reality: “Any name can be destroyed, can destroy itself. My value is not in my permanence but in the resilience with which I recover, and re-cover, and re-form after the deluge” (Dunham 152).
In addition to the function of a name as the signifier of a person, a name change can be political and productive. In In A Queer Time and Place, Halberstam explains that “Foucault, and Butler for that matter, clearly believe that resistance has to go beyond the taking of a name (‘I am a lesbian’), and must produce creative new forms of being by assuming and empowering a marginal positionality” (53). Halberstam’s argument illustrates the productive power of queer identities. The action itself of taking on a new descriptor can result in new ways of navigating the world, altering the communities within which one has access. Therefore, the name itself is not only what it ontologically is, but its nature is also shaped by what the taking on of that name can do.
One must therefore view a name as not simply a material property but also a sign that holds specific cultural weight and functions as an identifier, one that is able to change. The event in which trans people change their birth names, like Janet Mock and Cyrus Grace Dunham, is becoming increasingly more common. Much of this may be due to a queer collective awareness of the malleability of the self and identity, as well as the power and influence that names hold. If a name is not concrete, what else is up for revision? What about identity?
TRANSIENCE OF IDENTITY
Cyrus Grace Dunham expresses that “I know myself insofar as I know I am not singular, that what I am in this moment is born out of everyone I have ever known” (152). Dunham is exceedingly aware of the multiplicity of the self and how they have been totally shaped by experience.
Assemblage theory illustrates that an assemblage has, “defining emergent properties produced by their interacting parts” (Manuel de Landa 140). In other words, the traits and qualities that come to constitute queerness may very well be a result of the ways in which the world responds to queer people. Queerness is not solely about sexuality, and has a relational component as well: “Being queer meant so many things to me that were not about sex exactly, though they were connected to it” (Clausen 58).
Gloria Anzaldúa pictures identity as “‘a river – a process. Contained within the river is identity and it needs to flow, to change to stay a river’” (McCann & Monaghan 166). An example of identity in flux, like the river above, is found in Lorde’s work: “We had come together like elements erupting into an electric storm, exchanging energy, sharing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted, passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves the better for the exchange” (253). A person can be altered by contact, as Lorde presents since personhood is a process of relations and of movement. It is while swimming in the constancy of shifting and changing that one can truly become.
This imagery of constant shifting and of changing while also remaining intact is incredibly common across every queer memoir in this project. This indicates that the transience and flux of identity and the instability of the self is a determining characteristic present in the assemblage of queerness. Queer historians often call this transience “ephemera,” which has been used throughout many other projects to prove and identify queerness (McCann and Monaghan, 234).
NEGOTIATING IDENTITY
Based on the findings of this project, there are two aspects to queer identity that appear to reciprocally inform each other: 1) an internal experience and 2) an external identification. The negotiation between an internal sense of gender or sexuality and the external presentation and identification begs the question: how do the two of these interact?
Manuel De Landa posits that “Wholes emerge in a bottom-up way, depending causally on their components, but they have a top-down influence on them” (21). Consequently, perhaps an innate preference towards one gender or sexuality (bottom-up) may lead toward identification with a sexuality or gender category. Then, the ways in which that identity functions will have a top-down effect, the identity itself affecting a person’s life.
Queer identity is both an internal preference and an external way of being in the world. Queerness can move in new directions of living and thinking once an identity category is placed on a person. This is because identity is no longer purely internal; it changes the moment it is expressed to others: “Personal identity, on the other hand, has not only a private aspect but also a public one, the public persona that we present to others when interacting with them in a variety of social encounters” (De Landa 27). In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland is acutely aware of this same phenomenon: “Queer embodiment, like Carson’s, like mine, requires a presence, a negotiation with publicness” (118). The public expression of queerness changes the nature of it instantaneously.
De Landa’s description of how assemblages “emerge from the interactions between their parts, but once an assemblage is in place it immediately starts acting as a source of limitations and opportunities for its components (downward causality)...but a close-knit community also tends to be solidary, an emergent property that provides a resource to its members when it comes to political mobilisation (21). In other words, once an assemblage is formed (queerness and its accompanying labels and categories) it becomes very useful for community and solidarity, as well as political mobility. But at the same time it also creates and polices norms.
Audre Lorde touches on a limitation of identity categories, illustrating how norms have been established as a result in queer communities: “I wasn’t cute or passive enough to be “femme,” and I wasn’t mean or tough enough to be “butch.” I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community” (224). In some queer spaces, certain conventions have become the standard, even when queerness itself is supposed to be non-normative. This occurrence is frequently called homonormativity.
Jan Clausen also empathizes with the limitations of identity categories that require people to totalize their identity: ““The fact that many people are neither gay nor straight encourage the liminal to falsify their lives for the sake of fitting in” (362). After leaving a lesbian relationship to enter a straight-presenting one, Clausen became an outcast from her previous social structures. The community that she once had an integral place in began to distance itself from her: “A lot of women loving women expected me to know my place, to go back to hethood quietly” (355). Her body of work and her writings on queerness received a great deal of backlash, and she lost many friends and acquaintances in the process. Not only that, but Clausen also found herself standing in the wake of a crumbling identity and the immense trauma associated with its loss: “The upheaval that voyage occasioned has been incalculably more traumatic than my original coming out’” (23). Clausen’s account demonstrates that it was not simply an essence or identity that affected her life events; rather, the ways in which her identity was interpreted by others completely changed her internal experience, resulting in an overall net negative emotional toll.
Despite the occurrence of negative experiences with identity categories, they simultaneously have proven to be quite useful for other memoirists. Janet Mock had a positive experience with these categories, as she proudly asserts, “I am a trans woman of color, and that identity has enabled me to be truer to myself, offering me an anchor from which I can uplift my visible blackness, my often invisible trans womanhood, my little-talked-about native Hawaiian heritage, and the many iterations of womanhood they combine” (249). Mock’s identification as a trans woman of color helped her to find community and understand herself more deeply. Mock’s interaction with identity categories has certainly been far more positive than Jan Clausen’s. One must note that Mock fit neatly into the binary (23) while for Clausen, there was no term or label to make sense of her experience, no community to turn to (353), which likely influenced their points of view on the topic.
CONCLUSION
In summary, this project utilized an analysis of twelve memoirs in order to gain an understanding of the lived experience of queerness by using theories of assemblage as its framework.
I must provide two disclaimers: 1) This project only analyzes queerness in the United States and 2) Not everyone will be able to see themselves represented in this project, a product of its brevity. Representation is a journey, not a destination, and these twelve memoirs should not be understood as concretely representative of queerness as a whole. This is only a small snapshot of all of the queer memoirs in circulation. The memoirs were chosen by me, with my own life experiences and positionality likely playing a role in the stories that I chose to center the discussion around. I acknowledge that from my project some identities are missing: persons who identify as asexual, bisexual, some indigenous, religious, or racial minorities, intersections of disability, and more. These are just a few areas in which I would love to see more work done moving forward.
Therefore, I invite other queer or trans* individuals to continue this work, continuing to excavate queer and trans* memoirs and bring new authors into the spotlight, more voices into this arena. The memoir is an excellent vehicle for understanding queer and trans* experiences, and further work within this genre would be highly beneficial.
