Abstract: The limitations of testimony are difficult for trans youth to negotiate as they contend with the “hidden adult” of children’s literature. This article seeks a more expansive future for trans youth witnessing by recognizing how the moments of resistance in the memoirs it discusses originate from a BIPOC/feminist/queer tradition of pedagogical autobiography. As these texts by Katie Rain Hill, Skylar Kergil, and Jazz Jennings demonstrate, the trans youth memoir is least limited when it envisions its work as peer-to-peer witnessing, not testifying to an adult audience with the power of necropolitical judgment.
Abstract: The article presents a narrative analysis of the motifs of luck and fate as they appear in an autobiographical narrative of forced labor written by a former adolescent Ostarbeiter from Stalingrad.
Abstract: The Best Minds is a hybrid text that intertwines cultural biography, autobiography, and the history of psychiatry in the United States. This article argues that Rosen’s narrative is structured through a logic of “entanglement,” capturing the intertwined lives of Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor alongside broader sociocultural, political, and psychiatric discourses. The “biographical dialectics” of Jonathan’s and Michael’s lives captures the ongoing, unresolved negotiation of identity in chronic illness. Michael’s life is marked by continuous disruption without narrative closure, contrasting with Jonathan’s retrospective capacity to impose coherence. This asymmetry underscores the narrative power imbalance between subject and narrator, and ultimately raises questions about ethical engagement with, and narrative accountability for stories of mental illness.
