“Trans-ing: a Transwoman’s Story Beyond Transnormative Life Writing”
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation engages with examples of transgender experience in relation to my own reality as a transwoman in the Western Cape, South Africa. My purpose is to assert the value of transwomen’s lives and experiences at all stages of their being, beyond socially-preferred traditional narratives of transition. In my writing and thinking, I work both with and against received parameters of life writing, seeking to move beyond society’s expectations of what constitutes acceptable, transnormative life narration, whether in terms of familiar subject matter, foci, tropes or scope. I draw on the concept of trans-ing, inspired by Hil Malatino’s research, to position transgender identity as always individually in process, rather than typified by a simplistically representative ‘before’ versus ‘after’. This processual and ongoing advocacy for transness as necessary incompletion is a core part of my investigation into transness, trans lives and efforts to reconfigure transnormative life writing. To explore this, I find points of intersection between my own autoethnographic account of trans becoming in the Cape Flats, Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and other transwomen’s life storying. A section of the dissertation engages with the precarious voices of transwomen more marginalised even than I am. Another section engages with the trans memoirs of Anastacia Tomson, Always Anastacia: A Transgender life in South Africa (2016), Landa Mabenge Becoming Him: A Trans Memoir of Triumph (2018), Juliet Jacques Trans (2015) and Kate Bornstein Gender Outlaw (1994). I show that these memoirs variously adopt and adapt familiar transnormative life writing conventions such as linear narration, gender continuity, the psycho-medical aspect of transitioning, and transitioning as entailing pre- and post-operation focal points. In this dissertation, I include fragments of my own trans(itioning) experiences, as in the memoir account Kleintjie, which imaginatively recollects aspects of my childhood and …
abstract: This dissertation engages with examples of transgender experience in relation to my own reality as a transwoman in the Western Cape, South Africa. My purpose is to assert the value of transwomen’s lives and experiences at all stages of their being, beyond socially-preferred traditional narratives of transition. In my writing and thinking, I work both with and against received parameters of life writing, seeking to move beyond society’s expectations of what constitutes acceptable, transnormative life narration, whether in terms of familiar subject matter, foci, tropes or scope. I draw on the concept of trans-ing, inspired by Hil Malatino’s research, to position transgender identity as always individually in process, rather than typified by a simplistically representative ‘before’ versus ‘after’. This processual and ongoing advocacy for transness as necessary incompletion is a core part of my investigation into transness, trans lives and efforts to reconfigure transnormative life writing. To explore this, I find points of intersection between my own autoethnographic account of trans becoming in the Cape Flats, Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and other transwomen’s life storying. A section of the dissertation engages with the precarious voices of transwomen more marginalised even than I am. Another section engages with the trans memoirs of Anastacia Tomson, Always Anastacia: A Transgender life in South Africa (2016), Landa Mabenge Becoming Him: A Trans Memoir of Triumph (2018), Juliet Jacques Trans (2015) and Kate Bornstein Gender Outlaw (1994). I show that these memoirs variously adopt and adapt familiar transnormative life writing conventions such as linear narration, gender continuity, the psycho-medical aspect of transitioning, and transitioning as entailing pre- and post-operation focal points. In this dissertation, I include fragments of my own trans(itioning) experiences, as in the memoir account Kleintjie, which imaginatively recollects aspects of my childhood and …
author: Ryklief, Elana Leah
language: en
date published: 2026-03
date modified: 2026-07-24T04:40:09Z
provider: Stellenbosch University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University