In “Interiority,” Aqdas Aftab addresses how trans studies engages with the entangled relationships between narrative and transgender identity. Western trans narratives have often followed a teleological path, with the imagined gendered destination offering fixed individualist actualization. Trans studies offers many critiques of the neoliberal underpinnings of linear trans life narratives that are often mediated by the medical industrial complex. However, neither queer nor trans studies have paid adequate attention to decolonial manipulations of form that trans writers of color have been undertaking. Aftab’s presentation thus discusses how interiority allows for a decolonial rupture of teleological trans narratives by refusing closure, containment, and capture through a study of Akwaeke Emezi’s novel Freshwater. Aftab examines how interiority functions in the novel as an essential component of trans narrative worldmaking. By focusing on the spiritual multiplicity of differently gendered narrative voices, their paper explores how interiority creates decolonial hermeneutic possibilities in the study and production of trans narratives.
In “Character,” Tyler Bradway contests the skepticism toward character that often grounds queer literary studies. For example, Judith Roof argues that the queerness of a text is “not produced by the presence or activities of characters.” For Roof, queer characters are either extraneous or reifying details with little agency to reshape narrative’s heteronormative structure. By contrast, Bradway unfolds a narrative theory of character-detail to grasp the queer affordances of character in contemporary LGBTQ literature. Character-detail foregrounds the superficial surfaces that make a character distinct: Dorothy’s red slippers; RuPaul’s laugh; Nosferatu’s shadow. Queer literature narrates the friction between character-details and character-types contingently marked as “queer.” It illuminates the fraught relationships that queers have to the ephemerality of queer character as a social form. He traces these affective relations through AK Summers’ graphic narrative Pregnant Butch and Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory," in which character does not trap queerness in identity, and character-details do not distract us from the artificial nature of representation. On the contrary, queer character-details unlock foreclosed narrative trajectories for queerness and keeps queer relationality alive beyond a story’s diegesis.
In “Analepsis/Prolepsis,” Roy Pérez explores how the too-late and too-soon disorder of queer sociality lends itself to the imaginative dysregulation of narrative form. Among time-warped forms of focalization, analepsis—or flashback—allows the retrospective narrator to lead us from queer sexual possibility to actualization. Prolepsis—a stealthy form of advance mention, a narrative “seeding,” that becomes visible as such only once actualization is realized—is a more assertively playful way of undermining normative social signposts by encoding queer information within a straight landscape. This paper examines the flashback and the seed—analepsis and prolepsis—as strategies for divulging and withholding legibility in queer narrative. If queer time points to a temporality the weaves against straight time, queer narrative timing might refer to the tactics of disclosure and withholding that shape queer being.
In the final paper, Dana Seitler takes up "focalization" as a queer performative act; that is, as a collective and relational doing rather than a technique of liberal individualism. This entails re-theorizing focalization away from its hetero-narrative uses and toward queer collective ones. Coined by Genette and defined as a “selection or restriction of narrative information,” Seitler suggests, instead that we understand focalization as a device that has the potential to make collectivity imaginable. Seitler explores this potential through Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, a novel told from the point of view of twelve British women of color in a free-flowing, fragmented style Evaristo calls “fusion fiction.” The novel, Seitler suggests, formally disidentifies with the singularities of narrative voice in order to bring all the characters—queer, racialized, non-binary—into collective relation.