Confessions of the Fox and Transgender Literary History

Jordy Rosenberg's 2018 novel Confessions of the Fox outlines two ways in which narratives of transgender literary history might be contested: first, the deconstruction of genre distinctions and, second, the displacement of temporality and authenticity as cornerstones. In the first case, the novel dismantles the boundary between memoir and novel — quietly, by composing two fictional autobiographies, Voth's and Sheppard's, and resoundingly, when the words of Frederick Douglass explode anachronistically into the text. While the narrative agencies of genre were profoundly different for Black authors owing to the struggle against chattel slavery, Douglass introduces a new framework for thinking about the generic distinctions that Rosenberg's novel works to destabilize. In its second intervention, Confessions rejects the grounding of authenticity in historical propriety, finding promise instead in falsehood, forgery, and impossible simultaneity in dialogue with recent trans theory that questions continuity, progression, and teleology. Drawing on the work of Teagan Bradway, Ramzi Fawaz, Marquis Bey, and Trish Salah, and anchored by the foundational writing of Sandy Stone, this essay shows how Confessions participates in a turn in trans studies from traditional forms of literary history to new kinds of storytelling.