Transformed Bodies: Transgender Superheroines in Young Adult Fiction

This paper examines the Japanese anime television series Gonna Be the Twin-Tail!! (2014) and the American young adult (YA) novel Dreadnought (2017), both of which feature a transgender superheroine. While previous research in transgender YA fiction focused on realist novels, the scholarship in the superhero genre has mostly pertained to cisgender, in particular male, characters. My work thus ventures on gauging the implications of the conflation of transgender YA fiction and the superhero genre. I argue that, by endowing a young adult character with a new anatomy through supernatural means, the speculative texts not only afford young adult readers/viewers opportunities to see the body as a vehicle for the (re-)exploration of gender in ways that realist texts may now allow, but they also undercut the masculinist and binary undertone rooted in the superhero genre by inheriting the fluidity of transness. The figure of the transgender superheroine, therefore, aligns with the agenda of speculative fiction to allow for envisaging alternative modes of being, in particular those about bodies and gender.