Book Section
B Camminga
Persistence
Model Asylum Narratives and a Recognizable ‘Transgenderness’
In recent years, autobiographical narratives by transgender migrants and refugees from Africa have emerged, such as Farah Abdi’s Never Arrive, Neo Sandja’s Right Mind, Wrong Body, and Rizi Xavier Timane’s An Unspoken Compromise. This chapter examines these texts’ geographical focus and the resurgence of the ‘wrong body’ trope, considering what the transgender asylum narrative offers to the ‘trans travel narrative’. A key difference is the lack of a safe return — what I term the ‘unsafe return’.
| Title |
Persistence
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| Subtitle |
Model Asylum Narratives and a Recognizable ‘Transgenderness’
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| Author(s) |
B Camminga
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
In recent years, autobiographical narratives by transgender migrants and refugees from Africa have emerged, such as Farah Abdi’s Never Arrive, Neo Sandja’s Right Mind, Wrong Body, and Rizi Xavier Timane’s An Unspoken Compromise. This chapter examines these texts’ geographical focus and the resurgence of the ‘wrong body’ trope, considering what the transgender asylum narrative offers to the ‘trans travel narrative’. A key difference is the lack of a safe return — what I term the ‘unsafe return’.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
|
| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
|
| Date |
20 May 2025
|
| Subject |
transgender refugee
trans travel narrative
trans autobiography
wrong body narrative
transgender Africa
|
| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
|
| Language |
en-GB
|
| page start |
133
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| page end |
154
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| Source |
Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 133–54
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