Masks and Autodiegetic Narrative Strategies in Trans Young Adult Novels

Abstract

In a very large number of young adult novels in which the protagonist is transgender, the latter takes on the story as an autodiegetic narrator. This choice of narration is part of the awareness-raising strategies common to youth literature and trans literature, which are embodied in the mobilisation of a testimonial system. This gives discursive authority to a narrator who is both adolescent and transgender, giving them agency over the story as well as over their life. This strategic narrative form is also a matter of assignment; trans people's literary production is often limited to the narrow confines of self-writing, under the weight of cisgender injunctions that influence its form and content. A strategy, an assignment, this format also constitutes a narrative decoy, behind which hides an adult author, often cisgender, who mimes a trans adolescent. They project a falsified authenticity to their representation of transidentity, shaped by the prism of transnormativity that permeates the whole of society and in which they participate. The narrator’s “I” is thus traversed by different competing forces, which are in turn embodied in them and complicate their outlines.