Begin Anywhere: Transgender and Transgenre Desire in Qiu Miaojin's Last Words from Montmartre (è’™é¦¬ç‰ é�ºæ›¸)

What is the relationship of gender to genre in literary form? In his study of Leslie Feinberg�s Stone Butch Blues, the ambivalently autobiographical �story of a transsexual who � like Feinberg hirself, halts her transition through surgery and hormones to found an embodied transgendered subjectivity,� Jay Prosser observes that the book also �produces an alternative generic form�a trans-genre: a text as between genres as its subject is between genders.�1 In Stone Butch Blues, Prosser seems to suggest, the radically embodied nature of the protagonist�s transsexuality demands the production of an equally radical literary form; form follows content as the text moves to accommodate the story�s �embodied transgendered subjectivity� (and not the other way around). But what happens when a literary work inverts the relationship of form and content so that the writing itself becomes a site for expression of transgender identity, an end in itself? In other words, what happens to autobiographical form when writing functions not reflexively, as a means of narrating transgender subjectivity, but generatively, as a means of creating and even embodying it? Keywords: Literary Form, Queer Representation, Bare Life, Modern Chinese Literature, Utopian Vision