“Embodiments, Disorientations and Misalignments: Jackie Kay’s 'Trumpet'”,

This essay focuses on Jackie Kay’s award-winning novel Trumpet (1998). Trumpet interrogates precisely this tension between materiality and immateriality and further problematizes it by specifically drawing attention to the intersectional aspects characterizing human subjectivity. By telling the story of a black transgender person whose biological gender identity is discovered only after death, Kay’s novel interrogates normative sociocultural discourses, based on dualisms such as self/other, private/public, white/black, male/female and straight/queer and, in this way, encourages readers to analyse and deconstruct assumed notions concerning identity, memory and history. Focusing in particular on the concept of queer embodiment as theorized by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006), in this article I explore the interface and the destabilizing effects caused by the relationship between the queer individual and discursive regimes of normativity including discourses on race, class, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Therefore, the narrative explores several forms of what Ahmed calls ‘misalignment’, or an uncomfortable disorientation experienced by queer black individuals in a dominantly white, heteronormative environment.