"The way you wave your hat": performativity and self-invention in Jackie Kay's "Trumpet" and Duncan Tucker's "Transamerica"

Abstract

Kay's "Trumpet" and Tucker's "Transamerica" make explicit use of transgender subjects to deal with the intricate and hybrid nature of identity. These characters dismantle their surrounding universe where family choices and social identifications can be no longer predetermined. Likewise, as paradigmatic queer texts, both stories transgress conventional categories and paradoxically, their epistemological collapse turns into a powerful source of meaning, inasmuch as those categories -sex, gender, nationality, race, family, genealogy- are eventually confronted with their own contingency and their openness for new meanings. Through the exploration of overt themes as adoption, jazz, nomadism and transsexuality -which work also as powerful metaphors for the fluidity and precariousness of the Self- these authors align themselves with the performativity paradigm in their assumption that identity must be invented and reinvented. In this context, the transgender subject becomes the epitome of instability and diasporic meaning, generating a scenario of ambiguity which invites alternative ways of coping with subjectivity.