Kiss Your Comrades

Abstract

Kiss Your Comrades consists of my short story collection, Kiss Your Comrades, and a critical commentary, detailing both the writing and research process.
Kiss Your Comrades is a collection of linked narratives centring trans perspectives and using storytelling as a method to challenge cis-heteronormativity and explore beyond-the-binary politics. Organised around five recurring trans-queer characters who live on the margins of society, this group is connected through geography and community, with stories emphasising their intimacy and tenacity.
Kiss Your Comrades is a trans narrative imagining transness beyond the body. The collection presents transition as a non-linear and ongoing process and constructs transness through friendship and tactics of survival to highlight the community’s muscle of resistance and to celebrate trans-queer resilience.
The commentary sets forth the context for, and the particularities of constructing a trans narrative. The first half of the commentary overviews the state of British/American trans writing; examines the transition memoir and the focus on surgical transition as the dominant theme within the mainstream trans narrative. It then moves into a discussion about the gender binary as an oppressive force on trans lives, setting forth the queer theory and scholarship that shaped the characters’ praxis and identities. The second half of the commentary delves into the particularities of constructing a trans narrative; beginning with a discussion of the short form and establishing its shared history with marginalised practitioners, before moving into an examination of linked narratives and short story cycles as a chief structural scheme. Finally, it explores the collection’s thematic depictions of trans lived experience.

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