Submitted Abstract
At the centre of this project is the collection of autobiographies of transgender people assembled at the Lili-Elbe-Archive – Inter, Trans, Queer History in Berlin, an institution committed to the preservation of unique documents in the sphere of the German and international history of the transgender community. The focus of this dissertation project will be the German language autobiographies from the 1980s to 2016, which will be analysed with narratological but also comparative and queer-theoretical means. The research will be centred around the following questions: What narrative situations can be identified in these autobiographies? Are there narratological similarities between the autobiographies? How did the form of the autobiographies of transgender people as a genre evolve in the various decades in the timespan of 1980 to 2016? Are there possible influences to be recognized from non-German autobiographies which had a significant impact on the transgender community, and possibly on the structures of the corpus? These questions will be investigated synchronically but also diachronically.The significance of this project is not only academic, as there are numerous insights to be expected from the analysis of this genre, but also societal: the very own voices of a marginalised group are put into focus.