Plastic Bodies, Plastic Minds? Transforming Transgender Childhood through Fiction

Sven Van den Bossche

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Chapter 10 Plastic Bodies, Plastic Minds? Transforming Transgender Childhood through Fiction

In: Poetics of Disturbances

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Sven Van den Bossche

Sven Van den Bossche
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 204–222

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004519886_012

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Abstract

In Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules Gill-Peterson (2018) argues that medical care for transgender children was founded on a developmental narrative of gender identity. This means that a child’s gender is seen as still “rectifiable” and in development toward an adult “fixed” identity. According to Gill-Peterson, medical treatments, such as the prescription of hormone blockers to trans children, are based on a discourse of child “plasticity” and confirm a narrativisation of growing up as becoming stably gendered. While ideas of a child’s ignorance, development, and plasticity continuously inform medical protocols, fictional representations of transgender children have the capacity to foreground other ways of imagining trans childhood by means of focalisation, character-narrators, and the evocation of consciousness. This chapter shows how fiction can create a multitude of alternatives to the normative narrative of plasticity. It investigates specifically how transgender childhood narratives are reimagined in contemporary cinema and narrative prose through disruptive voices, actions, or metaphors. To do so, two case studies will brought forward, namely the Belgian film Ma vie en rose (1997) by Alain Berliner and the Dutch novel Mijn lieve gunsteling (2020) by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. In opposition to an objectifying medical discourse that ignores the possibility of agency and sets a normative standard for a child’s temporal development, these representations paint a more complex image of the embodied experiences of trans child characters by means of specific literary devices. The film centralises the trans child’s perspective by emerging the audience in her fantastical worldview, while the novel counterbalances the limited perspective of an unreliable narrator with animal metaphors that allude to the child’s embodied experiences. As such, through an integration of embodied, queer and transgender narratology the chapter highlights the narrative techniques that evoke experiences of trans childhood beyond the dominant developmental story of the plastic trans child.

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Poetics of Disturbances

Narratives of Non-normative Bodies and Minds

Series: Narratives and Mental Health, Volume: 2

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004519886

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 24 Oct 2024

Subjects
- Biology
  - Psychology
  - Interdisciplinary Sciences
- Literature and Cultural Studies
  - Literature, Arts & Science
  - English & Anglophone

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Chapter 10 Plastic Bodies, Plastic Minds? Transforming Transgender Childhood through Fiction

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Poetics of Disturbances

Narratives of Non-normative Bodies and Minds

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