ABSTRACT |
Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica make
explicit use of transgender subjects to deal with the intricate and
hybrid nature of identity. Functioning as destabilizing agents, these
characters dismantle their surrounding universe where family choices and
social identifications can be no longer fixed and predetermined.
Likewise, as paradigmatic queer texts, both stories transgress
conventional categories and paradoxically, their epistemological
collapse turns into a powerful source of meaning, inasmuch as those
categories –sex, gender, nationality, race, family, genealogy-- that so
strongly determine the subject’s identity and his/her sense of belonging
are eventually confronted with their own contingency and their openness
for new meanings. Through the exploration of overt themes as adoption,
jazz, nomadism and transsexuality –which work also as powerful metaphors
for the fluidity and precariousness of the Self-- these authors align
themselves with the performativity paradigm of Judith Butler’s and other
queer theorists in their assumption that identity –more an imaginary
construction of desire and fantasy than an essential or empirical
given-- must be invented and reinvented. In this context, the
transgender subject becomes the epitome of instability and diasporic
meaning, and like a sort of “strange attractor” generates a scenario of
ambiguity which invites alternative ways of coping with subjectivity and
its social perception.
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