One Body, Two Graves: Transgender Horror and Futures in Manhunt and “The Masker”

Over the past couple of years, a proliferation of queer authors has taken the helm of speculative fiction genres such as fantasy, horror or science fiction to tell stories which, while adhering to genre conventions, explore matters previously marginalized to contemporary realistic literary fiction. The aim of this paper is thus, to analyse two recent examples of contemporary trans-feminine fiction, the novel Manhunt by Gretchen Felker Martin, and the short story “The Masker” by Torrey Peters, to showcase how through said genre conventions and tools of horror, their authors approach matters of gender, conformity, passing and transition. While in Manhunt, Felker Martin utilises a dystopian setting offset by a hormone driven virus to question matters of marginality, the horror inherent to dysphoria and totalitarian discourses, “The Masker” utilises a more grounded approach to scrutinise fears around transition and attraction. Through these techniques, both authors arrive to conclusions related to the necessity of queerness for any kind of hopeful future making, aligning themselves with theorists like José Esteban Muñoz or Jack Halberstam, and speaking of matters related to the necessity of fighting back through the reclamation of bodily autonomy and identities that transcend vacuous homonormative standards that align with liberal standards unable to cement any viable future.