Guest Critic: Gabriela Garcia

The term transgressive fiction emerged in a 1993 Los Angeles Times article in which critic Michael Silverblatt described texts that cross moral and sexual boundaries with little emotion, fictions of purposeful shock and discomfort meant to wake us, as readers, out of our numbness to everyday cruelty. Silverblatt posited that “American audiences are inured to violence—when the violence is entertaining. As soon as violence becomes painful and shocking (that is as soon as it transgresses against our dulled senses) our response is rage.” That’s how he described the brutality and hyperconsumerism of Chuck Palahniuk’s characters in his novels Fight Club and Invisible Monsters, and the sexual violence that Patrick Batemen so casually committs in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Transgressive fiction—centered mostly on violence against women and voyeuristic masculine fantasies of power—is meant to shock audiences into a kind of transcendence when they are pushed up against the borders of acceptable inhumanity.

But do these classic “transgressive” texts really achieve their purported goal? We live in a world where American audiences are already so inured to predatory male violence that grabbing women by the pussy is not an offense that would disqualify someone from the presidency. The sexual assault of children trapped in cages is not the stuff of bleak risqué fiction, but of Tuesday’s news. Fight Club is the incel bible du jour, and Bret Easton Ellis is the literary darling of conservative media. In this world, we ought to reconsider and reframe transgression. And in these times, what texts practice a productive rage, rather than write white male fury onto women’s bodies?

The five texts selected here violate boundaries—some literal and physical, some social and moral—through a wider, more inclusive lens than envisioned in the ’90s. In doing so, they challenge us to rethink what it might mean for culture to be “transgressive.”

Solito, Solita: Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America—Steven Mayers and Jonathan Freedman, editors (2019)

In this collection of firsthand oral accounts of unaccompanied Central American minors who have either crossed the border into the US or were in the process of doing so when interviewed, one boy is forced to flee his home after his mother is gunned down before his eyes. When he arrives at the US border, he faces handcuffs and detention instead of safety. In another story,...