This topic is of particular importance both because trans literary practices are greatly under-studied and because narratives play a key role in trans lives and in trans access to care. While trans studies have been showcased at past meetings of the MLA, for instance with panels like “Contemporary Queer and Trans Life Writing: Locating the Autobiographical ‘I’” in 2026 and “Transphobia Past and Present” in 2025, such panels often focus their attention on the Global North, on English literary expression, and on normative genres of trans expression such as the autobiography. “Telling Trans Stories Otherwise” instead takes an active stance against these tendencies in trans literary studies by inviting scholars from the Global South (three out of four panelists) with papers that collectively propose both a transnational multilingual perspective (USA, Denmark, Turkey, India) and a multi-genre approach (memoirs, theater, poetry) to trans narratives.
To promote a diversity of newer voices on the topic of trans emancipatory narratives, this panel is composed of four presentations of 14 minutes each, allowing for 15 minutes of Q&A facilitated by presider Dr. Jordan J. Tudisco. Each paper uses the presidential theme of ‘emancipation’ to articulate a different point of departure from traditional perspectives on trans literature.
First, Hannah Jakobsen’s paper on Danish trans woman Lili Elbe and Danish-American trans woman Christine Jorgensen remains with the white Western trans memoirs that have normatively been centered in academic understandings of trans literature. However, it does so to critique how Elbe’s and Jorgensen’s memoirs were influenced by both travel writing and conversion memoir, thus affixing ‘arrival’ and ‘conversion’ as key tropes in popular conceptions of transness and transition and limiting the emancipatory potential of such autobiographical narratives.
Maisnam Arnapal’s contribution critically engages with memoirs by focusing on how the genre is used by Santa Khurai, an Indigenous trans activist in the Indian state of Manipur. Arnapal here highlights Khurai’s memoir both as an emancipatory narrative focused on survival, radical kinship, and solidarity and as an individual and collective history of militarized state violence which crystallizes the entanglement of everyday and transnational struggles in the lives of racialized trans people.
Berkem Yanikcan’s intervention takes us away from memoirs and focuses on theater as a space for trans emancipation. Centering Esmeray Özadikti, a Kurdish trans performer in Turkey, and her autobiographical play Kestirmeden Hikayeler, Yanikcan’s paper articulates emancipation not as the successful expression of a stable post-transition self but rather as the performative narration of embodied knowledge, erotic self-discover, and trans authority. Importantly, Yanikcan emphasizes how Özadikti articulates her individual emancipation as profoundly entangled with the social upheaval of the 2013 Gezi Park Protests, thus framing trans emancipatory practices away from individualized forms of private self-making and instead as a form of collective embodied life-making within political crisis.
Finally, Cameroonian writer, musician, and scholar Joël Simeu’s paper takes us back to the United States and offers a radical perspective on emancipation, not as a form of ‘freedom from,’ but as ‘freedom among.’ Indeed, focusing on Black American transmasculine poets Taylor Johnson, Amari Amai, and Jari Bradley, Simeu proposes that these poets extend a genealogy of Black Feminist grammar inherited from key figures like Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and Alice Walker, which focuses on embodied self-making, care, and a radical refusal of nostalgia. From this, these Black transmasculine poets articulate a mode of trans relationality centered on ‘amongness,’ an atmospheric, plural, and unresolved mode of being that is lateral, relational, and always in motion, in becoming. By arguing so, Simeu demonstrates how emancipation is not a mere declaration of freedom, but rather an everyday process, consistently made and unmade, in relation with both the living and the dead.
In bringing together such diverse perspectives on the concept of ‘emancipation’ in trans narratives, this panel contributes to the decentering of white Western voices in trans literary studies. It also showcases both how trans people articulate emancipatory narratives through different literary genres and theoretical frameworks and how normative narratives of transness may limit trans emancipation.