In this talk, I lay out the resistance logics and radical utopian potentialities of minor literature and the category of the minoritarian. Minor literature denotes literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. This talk operates from this decisive distinction to trace minor literary uses of identity, time, and labor as resistance to phobic public and state-sanctioned presumptions of how minor subjecthood is constructed and permitted to persist, or not. I will draw from my forthcoming monograph, TransGenre (Cambridge University Press) as well as my unpublished manuscript in progress, Further Toward Minor Literatures, to detail ways in which contemporary Anglophone transgender fiction exemplifies these resistance strategies, as well as some of the future prospects for feminist thought in light of the demonizing politicization of trans subjects. In closing, I’ll address some of the other vestiges of minoritarian politics and resistance through my research in sex work decriminalization, prison abolition, and necropolitics. It is my contention that queer and trans political resistance and aesthetic production present a dynamic suite of tactics and strategies for both resistance to erasure and carcerality, as well as the future of the novel and its capacities.
Aaron Hammes holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, and is the Virginia and Walter Nord Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Hammes has recently published on sex work, transgender postnormativity, and 70s crime film in South Atlantic Review, Humanities, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, and forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Transgender Literature, Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and GLQ. They are in the process of editing their first monograph, TransGenre, for Cambridge University Press.