Authors

Natalija Stepanovic¹;  ¹ University College London, UK

Discussion

Through centering transgender (self-)representation, this paper discusses pairing between plots and bodies that can inhabit them as well as the gendered dynamics of narrating one’s life. Authored by Bosnian writer Lejla Karamujić, ‘Dream Storage’ is one of the rare ex-Yugoslav trans-centric short stories. Its protagonist, a theatre janitor who is saving up for gender affirmation surgery, wants to fit into the ‘boy meets girl’ plot. To do so, he has to have an unmistakably masculine body. In contrast, Damir Zlatan Frey’s 2014 novel The Crystal Cardinal and Vjeran Miladinović Merlinka’s 2001 memoir Teresa’s Son: Autobiography Without Makeup embrace liminality. 

In The Crystal Cardinal, a novel documenting Frey’s development from a street-wise rascal into a renowned choreographer, the narrator-protagonist is split into a feminine and masculine self. After being brought up as a girl in infancy, his female double is occasionally summoned in play and performance. Teresa’s Son, a story about office worker Vjeran and his nighttime persona, a glamorous sex worker Marilyn,testifies of a similar schism. However, the autobiographers uphold a gender-based hierarchy – the masculine, authentic self is framed as a creator while the feminine, visibly theatrical self, is his fabrication. This hierarchy is fully obliterated in Jasna Jasna Žmak’s Mine You (2015), a fragmentary novel that treats gender as a free-floating signifier attachable to any kind of body.