Transfiguration: a narrative analysis of male‐to‐female transsexual

In the West, ‘transsexual’ emerged as a narrative position (Prosser, 1998). In order to begin to understand the complex relations between the discursive formation and the dangerous lived experience of male‐to‐female transsexuals, in this narrative analysis, which is a part of a larger study, the author examines how male‐to‐female transsexual is re/produced in narrative. She found that this transsexual narrative was contained within the heteronormative through a heteronarrative structure (Roof, 1996). The possibility of a transsexual body and subject outside the heterosexual matrix was erased as the narrative continually concluded in the heterologic, the modern alignment of sex/gender/sexual orientation. Homology, the logic of the perverse and ambiguous, of the middle, was an illusion as each instance of ambiguity was quickly pulled back into the heteronormative. This article ends with a rhizonarrative, as one attempt to transfigure the heteronarrative structure of the transnarrative.