Abstract
In today's society, we can observe a gap between the complex gender identities, experiences and embodiments of transgender people and the dominant reductionist scenario of gender transition as a movement from a "wrong" body towards a "right" body. This project turns to fictional transgender narratives in Dutch literature, focusing on various narrative structures and their capacity to render visible a large range of transgender subjectivities. The literary imagination opens up possibilities for narrating the multidimensional embodied experience of transgender characters beyond the formal and social conventions of transgender autobiographies. The analysis of transgender narratives is based on a corpus consisting of fictional literary works published in the Netherlands since the mid-twentieth century, when the public discourse surrounding transgender people started to take shape. In that literary corpus, I will investigate how metaphors, storyworlds and specific modes of narration and focalization evoke complex subject positions. As a result, my research will not only contribute to the growing field of transgender studies, but also demonstrate the valuable role of narratological approaches in emancipatory projects.
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