Autobiography, Specularity, and the Non-Identitarian Self

An Aporia? A Reflection on the Possibility of Saying "I” in a Trans Story

Abstract

This article proposes to explore from the perspective of the figurations of a nomadic self, the textual gender and the sexual gender, how subjectivity is configured in trans * stories of an autobiographical nature. In this sense, the Fatal (2020) chronicle of Carolina Unrein, as a mash-up made of discontinuous fragments, is a privileged setting to explore the Latin American “trava” and “trans” universe, not from the academic paradigms on gender from the North, but through the complex diversity of the concrete and singular registers of the experience of configuring oneself as a transvestite body in which the individual is always mediated by the collective, the collective by the individual and rooted in the context that Susy Shock calls “trans sudaca”. The specularity of the narcissistic identity story is here overcome by the construction of a fragmentary and discontinuous narrative whose organizing vanishing point is a central event: the vaginoplasty to which the narrator undergoes.