Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

Grover, Stacy Jane

Hardcover

Series: Appalachian Futures: Black, Native, and Queer Voices

Biographies GeneralLetters & EssaysGLBTQIA Studies

ISBN10: 0813197554
ISBN13: 9780813197555
Publisher: Univ Pr Of Kentucky
Published: Jun 20 2023
Pages: 152
Weight: 0.55
Height: 1.20 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.10
Language: English

I've lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don't know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story, because I don't feel like I've lived one. ... Though, in searching for ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this ordinariness.

Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as Appalachian. Appalachia existed farther afield--more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown.

Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity and experience with the regional culture and with the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness.

In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In Dead Furrows, a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. Homeplace threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover's coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association's guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for transgender care.

Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates how the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.

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Grover, Stacy Jane

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GLBTQIA Studies

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