Arts of survival; alternative historiographies of trans agency

This thesis considers forms of trans agency that dominant modes of historiography have struggled to ratify. I intervene in prevalent trends in scholarship about trans lives, which tend to claim that trans subjectivities are capacitated through rights-based politics. Such accounts are often characterized by their hyperfocus on spectacles of trans of colour people in pain and crisis, and corresponding disregard for the forms of agency, care, and protest in which trans people find everyday joy and freedom.

I turn to the arts of flourishing and survival elaborated by trans people themselves, in order to redress some oversights of dominant historiographies, which routinely dismiss trans people’s own interpretations of their capacities and agencies as not of historical, sociological, or theoretical significance.

Crucially, this project recognises trans people’s chosen approaches to care, community, and agency – which are occasionally legible to conventional historiography as real and worthwhile political activity, but are more often interpreted as trivial, irrational, and inconsequential – as the essential point of departure for scholarly work about trans lives.