The Alchemy of Transformation: Turning the Violence of Transphobia into Voice with Geoffrey Chaucer and Kai Cheng Thom

Abstract

This essay compares issues of gender diversity in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Pardoner’s Tale and Kai Cheng Thom’s recent novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir. This comparison expands on queer readings of The Pardoner’s Tale and demonstrates possible links across time between authors dealing with the experiences of gender diverse people. It shows how gender diverse people in different historical contexts can confront hatred and expand limiting frames of cultural expression, by drawing on their own embodied experiences as sources of knowing and converting that knowledge into forms of expressive culture.