| The dissertation, "Transgender Transnationalism: Representations of Immigrant Genders and Sexualities in Twentieth- and Twenty-first-Century American Literature," examines the joint impact that two controversial paradigms of border-crossing---" illegal" immigration and bodily transformations of gender or sex---have had on nation-based literary forms which reflect the changing relationship between the citizen and the nation in an era of increasing globalization. While it has often been observed that transnational flows of objects, ideas, and people tend to defy any legal barriers to their circulation, transgender subjects can also be said to remain undocumented insofar as they can fail to conform to legal notions of sex which define a body as either wholly male or female. Yet both types of "illegal" crossing are actually well documented in contemporary American literature, and the dissertation shows that the connection between desire, mobility, and embodiment which is depicted in transnational exchanges---and in narratives of immigration, especially---is in fact exemplified by transgender cultural formations. The reading of novels including Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, and The Pagoda by Patricia Powell; the short stories of Edith Maude Eaton; and autobiographical immigrant theater in present-day New York City reveals how these literary texts imagine the incorporation of certain new legal subjects (e.g. the gay expatriate, the intersexed citizen, the cross-dressed alien, and the transgender asylum seeker) into the national body, and also examines the uncertain resolution of the challenges that these figures pose to hegemonic forms of national subjecthood. The dissertation therefore analyzes transgender and transnational cultural formations not as the outlying anomalies nor as the shifting underground phenomena that they are commonly perceived to be, but rather as the clearest indicators of the political and aesthetic transformations that are taking place in literary and legal discourse at the beginning of the twenty-first century. |
