"Still me on the inside, trapped": Embodied Captivity and Ethical Narrative in Leslie Feinberg's <i>Stone Butch Blues</i>

Abstract

Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, while widely recognized and celebrated as a groundbreaking portrayal of a transgendered protagonist at the time of its publication, has rarely been seriously considered as a novel. Regularly assumed to be a thinly disguised autobiography and generally considered too "sentimental" to rank as a serious literary accomplishment, Feinberg's text is considered politically and pedagogically effective, but not literarily or culturally significant. Such assessments, however, take for granted both the genre of "sentimental" fiction and its status as "unliterary," and, in so doing, obscure the way that Feinberg both draws upon and revises traditions of women's literature-particularly the captivity narrative-to produce and alter the genre's particular sentimental effects. Understanding the way that Feinberg has constructed this deeply affective narrative is significant not only for our understanding of hir transgender protagonist, but for our approach to "multicultural" literatures more broadly. I would like to argue that Feinberg's revision of the captivity narrative is a pioneering and significant example of narrative that manages to represent a "minority" body without allowing that body to become rhetorical, symbolic, or displaced. In presenting readers with the opportunity for ethical contact, in Levinas's sense of the word, Feinberg eschews the focus on ethical content that has characterized, and limited, early approaches to multicultural curriculums and pedagogies, including the study of "minority" sexualities.