(Re-)Narrating Transgender Pasts, Presents, and Futures in Casey Plett's Little Fish

Abstract

In Casey Plett’s novel Little Fish (2018), the protagonist Wendy faces multiple lifechanging events at the same time: After her grandmother passes away, she finds out that her Mennonite grandfather might have been a trans woman and grapples with the way her family has narrativized him and remembers him. In the midst of this journey, her friend Sophie dies by suicide and Wendy is left to piece together Sophie’s past, navigate a present of mourning, and imagine a future without her. Building on theories of queer and trans temporalities, Kit Heyam’s recent work on trans histories, Susan Stryker’s Foucauldian reading of trans as a subjugated archive, and Margaret Middleton’s concept of ‘gaydar as epistemology,’ this paper explores how cisnormative narrations of transness and transitioning hold trans subjectivities in a constant temporal bind and, in turn, how Little Fish interrogates this bind through a (re-)narration of transgender pasts, presents, and futures. The temporal bind within cisnormative temporalities and narrations of transness is rooted in medicalization and pathologization and configures trans identity as a temporary phase on a linear transitioning path from a traumatic childhood in the past to the ‘curing’ of a ‘wrong body’ in the future. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that Little Fish is able to challenge the cisnormative narrative by desubjugating trans archives and utilizing specific, embodied knowledge of transness to come to an interpretation of the past that negates presupposed heterosexuality and cisnormativity, and instead opens the possibility for the complexity of queer and trans existence.