Latest news with #TheMasker
Hindustan Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Torrey Peters: 'Everybody, cis or trans, goes around choosing their gender'
Some stories in Stag Dance were previously self-published before your debut novel Detransition, Baby was published. Tell us about your publishing journey. Two of the stories in Stag Dance were originally self-published. From 2013 to 2017, I was part of a writing scene in Brooklyn that produced several writers who were influential to me, including Sybil Lam and Imogen Binnie. There was another group of writers — trans women writing for other trans women. You could write at a full sprint, without explaining yourself. At that time, people were saying that trans lives were so unique and new that you needed to invent a whole new genre to explain what it means to be trans. I don't think it's that special to be trans. I thought that you could write about trans lives in any genre, so I wrote these two novellas. The first one was Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones — a speculative fiction, which to me is really about the trans community. The second was The Masker, which is about how sexuality gets weaponised against trans women. These two became cult novellas in Brooklyn. They were not travelling all over the world but were being passed hand to hand. I had given it away for free on the internet, asking people to pay what they like. Slowly, they got more and more popular. Some editors came to me and said, 'Do you have a novel?' And I happened to have Detransition, Baby. While I thought initially that I was writing just for transwomen, the themes I was dealing with were bigger — the idea of family, femininity, and aspirational motherhood. Upon its publication, it travelled widely. I thought it'd go only this far but it kept on travelling further until it was translated into 13 languages. In a lot of ways, I felt very free writing that book because there were jokes in it that I thought maybe eight people would get. They were written for my friends. I think enjoyable literature has that sort of intimacy of people writing for somebody that they know; there's a care to it. But after Detransition, Baby, I had a lot of trouble writing because of the expectations. At the time, I was building a sauna in the woods and began thinking about loggers. When I started writing, I thought of this sort of turn-of-the-century lumberjack slang. The thing is that nobody was expecting that; nobody wanted it. As a result, I felt very free again in the same way I did while writing Detransition, Baby. I had The Chaser, plus those first two novellas, and I thought they could kind of go together, so let's put them together as a book, and that's Stag Dance. In my view, Stag Dance is also a pushback against the way queer and trans lives are represented in fiction. Particularly in Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones where the dystopia doesn't run along some feuding between superpowers but gender. Then, there's also a vocabulary that forces rethinking the assumed progress transfeminism has made. It also has fun, politicising via trivialising. For me, the setup of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones has two jokes in it. The first is post-apocalyptic fiction, in which something momentous happens — a nuclear explosion, a comet hitting the earth, or something unavoidable. But here, two ex-girlfriends invent a contagion that prevents your body from producing hormones, forcing people to take hormones the same way that trans people do. The idea was to say that what you do with your body is a choice. Your gender is not some innate, static thing. But that's why people just freak out when they learn how much of it is constructed; that threatens them. The second joke is the idea that if you take hormones, you're choosing your gender. But we're already choosing our gender every day. We just pretend that we're not doing it. When you wake up and decide if I'm going to have my hair this way, shave, put on makeup, or have my lips filled, you're choosing your gender. You're choosing how the world sees you in the clothes you want to wear, the way you talk, etc. The thing is that everybody, whether cis or trans, goes around choosing their gender. It's funny that people say to trans people that they're choosing their gender because they take hormones. I n the same story, Infect Your…, Lexi also says that, in the future, everyone will be trans, which reminded me of this popular slogan: The future is nonbinary. It's as if the present isn't — or can't be. The funny thing about a lot of such slogans is that they feel very dated. To say the future is female — or whatever — feels very 2017. Because in some ways, especially in the States, as the political situation has gotten more right-wing, intolerant, and repressive, you realise that a slogan isn't enough. The very idea of saying the future is nonbinary is not only nonsensical because the present is nonbinary, the present is female, the present is all of these things but also because the work is now. You can't defer it. It makes sense to have what Lexi says in the book because the story was written in 2016 when such slogans were around. I think it's interesting now to see that I was a little bit doubtful of some of that stuff back in 2016. Weirdly, I think I'm less cynical now in 2025, where I'm sort of like, I don't care what beliefs or slogans you've got. So long as you're doing something now, I'm fine with it. You turn the sisterhood solidarity equation on its head in The Masker by having the readers confront the idea that it's all about the choices one happens to make when overcome by desire. What did you intend to do with it? The setup for that story was that there's a person who's confused about their gender, and has gotten into online fetish, and in real life happens to be at a convention in Las Vegas. The protagonist Chris is confronted with two sorts of models — the first is a transwoman who has had surgery, who's very into her respectability as a woman. That she's a proper woman. The other is that of a fetishist, who wears a full-body silicone woman suit and is a doctor, who has a job and wife and kids in Los Angeles. He comes once or twice a year to Las Vegas to live his sexual fantasies. It's this dichotomy that interested me. On one hand, if you want to be a transwoman and be respectable, you're expected to erase your sexuality because you're dangerous to women in changing rooms, bathrooms, etc. On the other hand, if you're hypersexual, you're a complete fetishist, a pervert, not a woman at all. The story is deliberately meant to be uncomfortable and icky. As you say, what the character does is a series of betrayals, which are supposed to make you feel bad. For me, that's important if the reader feels bad because I'm asking, 'Why does it feel bad?' It is why I ended the book with this story because I wanted to sort of punch a reader in the stomach and leave. Not in a mean way, but in a way to make them think that if they felt bad then maybe something different needs to be done. In The Masker, the mention of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) makes it feel like a critique of consumerist culture, particularly, the visual medium's betrayal of trans people. But there's also a mention alongside of Pretty Woman (1990), a movie signalling an aspirational life. Why did you employ these cultural references? I think the book of mine that's most in conversation with popular culture was Detransition, Baby. The first few pages note how so much of trans identity is made about transition. But, what do you do when you're five, 10, or 15 years on the other side of transition? As I wasn't part of a generation that had a transwomen older than her, I was looking for models of being a woman in my thirties, so I saw a lot of television. The book names it the Sex in the City problem. You can get a husband and be a Charlotte. You can get a career and be a Samantha. You can have a baby and be a Miranda. You can be an artist and be a Carrie. And these were ciswomen ideals, by the way. So, even if you're a ciswoman, you're trapped. Imagine, as a transwoman, all you can do is aspire to be trapped in that way. The visual media ends up explaining so much of the feeling that I felt as a transwoman. I was a child when Silence… got released. The character in question, Buffalo Bill, whether cis or trans, has no femininity of his own. The only thing he can do is steal femininity. Literally, by killing and skinning ciswomen. Seeing that as a young child was upsetting because I knew I had some sort of femininity inside of myself but, if I looked at the media, it said I didn't. While Sex in the City, in some ways helped me understand myself, Silence… impeded my progress. The stereotype that femininity is inherent, biologically owned or entitled makes you internalise it. So, when the character sees the masker, he verbalises the internalised transphobia by saying that the masker is some Silence of the Lambs shit. A lot of my understanding of myself comes in a sort of detritus and flotsam of visual media, that not only did I see, but it also entered me. Now it comes out in my writing; it is the references, the language, and the sharpness, the sort of lacerating things that are inside of me that then come out in the writing. In The Chaser, the narrator builds a wall to immunise himself from being attracted to Robbie, who does the unthinkable, smashing all expectations one has of a submissive person. There's a suppression of desire at play here, visibilising a simmering of violence. Was that the intent? Yes, that's true. I wasn't interested in writing from Robbie's perspective — the typical way such stories are told where you say here's a nice person. It's difficult to say whether Robbie is trans, gay, or feminine. That was purposely done because I wanted to make the story stay in the realm of emotions and not invite a political analysis by naming who Robbie is. The other thing is that the sort of emotional building blocks that people normally attribute to trans people are equally attributable to others, too. Say the distance between how you see yourself and how you want the world to see you. The narrator is a cis male, handsome athlete yet the thing he struggles with is the difference between what he knows he is and feels and what he wishes the world saw he was. He's dealing with an inability to express his desire in a way that could lead to love. That he shuts down the possibility of love and makes it just purely sexual or about power — that's shame. So, that's what I was trying to do: things that are supposed to be trans things or trans experiences are things or experiences even the most centred person in a society like a cisgender, white, handsome athlete must also deal with. The only difference is that the latter doesn't want to name what's happening or what they're feeling. And what's scary for others is that trans people have language and names for these feelings that cis people go through. What's scary is also how people refuse to engage with developing vocabularies, which is why some reviewers have called your works 'messy'. There's a book by Joanna Russ about women's literature. She said that literature goes through three stages. The first is that you as a minority say to the dominant culture, 'Don't worry, we're just like you. You don't have to be afraid of us.' Then, there's a second phase when the minority says, 'Actually, we're nothing like you. We reject you. We're quite different. We define ourselves against you.' There's a third phase in which the minority says, 'Actually, we don't have anything to do with you one way or another. We don't define ourselves against or with you. We're our own thing.' These three stages can be seen in Black, gay, or trans literature. There's a fourth stage, which I think Russ doesn't talk about, which interests me. In this phase, the dominant culture picks up the language and lenses developed by the minority culture and applies to itself. At least in the States, you can see how white scholars are talking about race using what was developed by scholars of colour. Whiteness is learning about itself from people of colour. You know, the word heterosexuality came after the word homosexuality when straight people felt the need to have their own word to explain themselves. That's why the incredible freakout around trans people because our ideas are applicable broadly, and when people find them challenging, it only communicates the power of these ideas. Your inclusion in the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021 attracted a demeaning letter, which was signed by a few dead people, too. The funding you received from the Edinburgh Literature Festival was challenged, too. Then, President Trump's executive orders target trans lives. If that wasn't enough, we've literary stars like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and JK Rowling brandishing their ignorance and conservative views. In this context, could you help share how populism affects a writer? I think what I went through with the Women's Prize is indicative of the risks of populism. Obviously, it was painful for me to receive that letter, which looked amateurish and stupid. It got picked up by major newspapers, and I wondered why they were doing that when it was written by idiots. Well, they were reporting it because it would get engagement. But the thing is, this kind of populism is not easily controlled and it's double-edged. When the Women's Prize thing happened, my book was not a best seller in the UK. It had been nominated for the prize but wasn't that reviewed or known. Then, this letter came out and all of these famous writers started talking about my book. They started defending me, discussing it, making it a point. I have a lot of faith in readers because readers read this, heard about this thing and they were like, 'What is up with this?' Rather than just accept the stupid populist thing, they went out and bought the book. So, the week after that letter, my book went from low on some best seller lists to number five on The Times best seller list in the UK. It had never been on the list before that. Please name some people who have inspired you to create what you do? Nevada by Imogen Binnie helped me write the way I was writing. The writing by transwomen for transwomen is a universal thing rather than a niche thing. That book did that to me. But then, what inspired me in the last decade was Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, translated by Ann Goldstein. This realisation that, as a trans woman, I can talk back to the major literature of the era. That, in turn, allowed me to sort of do something that I think is quite audacious. Like, in the novella Stag Dance, written in workers' slang, the actual stag dance is a very specific American writing. Whether it be Moby Dick, written in a whaler talk, whether it be Mark Twain writing about the river stuff, or Cormac McCarthy doing sort of border wars. It was like what if I, as a transwoman, thought that my writing was as important as American, as at the centre as any of this stuff. And maybe I will be so audacious as to talk back to Herman Melville or Cormac McCarthy, even if I come from a small self-publishing press in Brooklyn.
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters review – genre games and gender mischief
When Detransition, Baby hit the shelves in 2021, its success took readers on both sides of the Atlantic by surprise. Longlisted for the Women's prize and selected as one of the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century, Torrey Peters's debut novel was among the titles that defined the literary landscape of the Covid-19 pandemic. Finding herself in the crosshairs of a mounting culture war, Peters became one of the world's best known trans writers, seemingly overnight. Of course, this isn't the full picture. Before her international breakthrough, Peters had self-published two novellas, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, shifting enough copies for mainstream publishers to take an interest. Both appear in Stag Dance, along with two pieces written either side of Detransition, Baby: the title story and The Chaser. They make up an ambitious compendium of a decade in writing. 'In the future, everyone will be trans': Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is set in a plague-ravaged dystopia where humans can no longer make their own sex hormones. Society falls apart as various factions seek to synthesise and control the flow of replacement hormones taken from pigs. It's a wild and gruesome story, packed with action but economically detailed. The Chaser is a preppy campus romance of sorts, articulating the suffocating desires felt by a Quaker boarding school student for his girlish roommate: it subtly upsets many of our ideas around love and sexual awakening. The Masker tiptoes into murky waters where fetish, queer sexuality and transgender identity mingle, exposing some extremely queasy power dynamics. And the titular Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, follows the men as they prepare for their winter festivities. Due to the lack of women, some must volunteer to attend en femme, a strangely kinky tradition that naturally generates unexpected possibilities. It is by turns thrilling and wickedly funny, weaving together bloodthirsty monsters and insatiably horny lumberjacks. A million miles from the tedious pioneer tales of James Fenimore Cooper, it's still a surprise after Detransition, Baby's cosmopolitan comedy of manners. The book as a whole brings to mind Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire in the way it uses genre conventions to address bigger themes. Just as Enríquez's spooky tales channel the horror of Argentina's military dictatorship, Peters inhabits her own disparate genres – dystopia, romance, horror, historical – to weave a transhistorical web of gender non-conforming characters. There is nothing ragtag about this collection, despite its long span of writing and diversity of genre, because Peters is such a capable and considerate writer, skipping between modes with apparent effortlessness. The pieces are meticulously crafted; especially Stag Dance, with its deft pacing and almost operatic denouement. Moreover, it is clear she is having a great deal of fun: even when exploring serious issues around gender and sexuality, the writing is mischievous rather than sanctimonious. Peters seems to delight in complicating liberal identity politics, refusing ever to sanitise her work or narrow her focus, and glorying in some truly rollicking prose. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is published by Serpent's Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
New York Times
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Think Gender Is Messy? Wait Until You Read These Stories.
In an 1817 letter to his brothers, the poet John Keats defined the concept of negative capability as 'when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' This is a quintessential trait of a great writer, who must know everything but create characters who know nothing, or only the wrong things, or different things on different pages. In her discomforting new collection, 'Stag Dance,' Torrey Peters excels at this particular kind of unknowing. Hopscotching through genres and decades, Peters, across three short stories and a novella, summons up characters whose ideas about sex, gender and sexuality exist beyond (or before, or to the side of) our current orthodoxies. Set in the early 1900s, the titular novella explores what happens when a restless winter camp of 'timber pirates' decides to throw a gender-bending soiree. Any man can declare himself a 'skooch' for the night and be courted by the others, but when the biggest, ugliest lumberjack, Babe Bunyan, steps up first, it upsets the camp's surprisingly fragile hierarchy of manhood. Babe Bunyan knows the other men expect (and even want) Lisen, the youngest, slightest, most feminine axman to take the role of skooch. Bunyan's own desires are unclear even to him. He wants to play the skooch, and he wants the men to court him, but more than anything, Bunyan wants Lisen to recognize that they are the same in some essential way that he can't define. Plaintively, he wonders, 'How do you beg when you don't even know the words to beg with?' When this desire for sisterhood gets thwarted, the stag dance becomes a violent competition. 'We were rivals,' Bunyan reflects of his new dynamic with Lisen. That, in a way, is his dream achieved. Because 'to be rivals is to be something the same.' The other stories in 'Stag Dance' run a gamut of painful settings, from future dystopia, to girls' weekend gone wrong, to aborted boarding school romance. In her acknowledgments, Peters says that she wrote each tale 'to puzzle out, through genre, the inconvenient aspects of my never-ending transition — otherwise known as ongoing trans life — aspects that didn't seem to accord with slogans, 'good' politics, or the currently available language.' Strip away the (sometimes clunky) antiquarian diction, and it's not hard to see a parallel between Babe Bunyan and a modern queer person just coming out, fascinated, infuriated and a little in love with someone one step further on their gender journey. Peters excels at plumbing the murky hearts of queer people. Her characters betray one another and themselves, and occasionally end the world in their desire for revenge. They embrace feelings they're not supposed to have. Frequently they're tormented by external manifestations of aspects of themselves that they have yet to admit, define or find a way to love. In the most disturbing of the stories, 'The Masker,' two women at a trans and cross-dressing convention in Las Vegas plan to publicly humiliate a third attendee, who they feel is not legitimately queer, just a fetishist in a 'poreless silicone skin' suit. As with the lumberjacks of 'Stag Dance,' however, it's the similarity between the characters that brings the story to its inevitably cruel and heartbreaking conclusion. Krys, the narrator, hates how she's 'saddled with a stupid fetish or gender or whatever.' When her trans friend Sally points out 'the masker' at the convention and calls 'him' a 'pervert,' Krys is struck by 'the disturbing knowledge that comes from distinguishing in others the parts of yourself that you most hate.' Is she a fetishist, a trans woman, both, or neither — and who gets to decide? Ultimately, Krys must sacrifice either Sally or the masker, and in so doing, sacrifice part of herself. The collection will likely make readers of all genders uncomfortable. That's on purpose. Peters's characters are complicated, in pain, angry and unsure of their own identities or desires. Her award-winning first novel, 2021's 'Detransition, Baby,' also courted controversy, by centering a character whose gender was messy, unclear and still evolving. Peters is not interested in 'positive' representation; she's interested in authenticity. She wants to show that every part of the queer experience, even the disturbing parts, or the parts we don't understand, are worthy of being made into art. That includes jealousy, doubt and negative capability. A great Torrey Peters story feels like punching yourself in the face, laughing at the bleeding bitch in the mirror and then shamefacedly realizing you're aroused by the blood on your lips. The four pieces in 'Stag Dance' will leave you bruised, broken and wanting more.
