Abstract

In Jackie Kay's award-winning novel, Trumpet (1998), the main character Joss Moody, a celebrated jazz trumpet player, is discovered upon his death to be anatomically female. The essay traces both postmodern and humanist affirmations of constructions of self-hood. Situating Virginia Woolf's version of a metaphysical and escapist androgyny as one kind of aesthetic against the material politics of the transgendered subject, the essay argues that Kay's novel can be seen as part of a 20th century tradition of literature and film which satirizes, parodies and painfully exposes the discontinuities of dominant sex–gender systems. The essay ends by arguing that Kay also develops these systems by imbricating sex and gender within a series of dislocated familial, sexual and racial identities, beginning with the arrival of Joss's African father in Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century.