Get the latest gossip
Transness Gets Metaphorical in Torrey Peters’s Stag Dance
She examines the messy underbelly of DIY trans culture, diving into the cringier aspects of queer growing pains.
Peters self-published short stories and novellas inspired by the erstwhile Topside Press, the indie publisher of trans and feminist fiction by such spiky writers as Imogen Binnie, Casey Plett, Cat Fitzpatrick, and Jeanne Thornton. While at times pessimistic — describing the group as “a coven of trans women polyamorously fucking each other to biblical levels of drama over the soundtrack of Skyrim ” — Peters ultimately ends the story in an optimistic place. Across Stag Dance, Peters refuses to play into the modern, overly determined motivations of contemporary fiction, instead harnessing a technique she calls “strategic opacity” as a way to access characterization not dependent on Psychology 101.
Or read this on VULTURE