The defining characteristic of bourgeois literature its claims to property rights over other people's pain.

(aka the Maggie Nelson effect)

You can read it via gender as well. Kate Zambreno's Heroines ( @SemiotextePress) is so good on this. Breton, Fitzgerald, Eliot just straight up *took* from women's lives and claimed to own them (Nadja, Zelda, Viv).

But it is also bourgeois in the sense that it was about property. Scot had Zelda sign papers about rights to her own story. Eliot just straight up took Viv's papers. Breton thought he owned crazy Nadja nothing.

Contemporary literature faces a fork in the road on that. It can look for ways to *do justice* to other's stories, to work with material outside of claims to property, or just straight up respect other ppl's claims to their own pain. Or it can just open up a land grab.

Just because they are not Dead White Males, doesn't protect cis women and white women from being the bad guy here. There's so much trading on the alibi of being not-men and yet claiming to own other ppls pain.

Of course, ppl should writer about whatever they want. But one really has to think about other ppl's stories as something other than land to annex. If someone gives you their story, it's a gift, and you are obligated by it.

It strikes me that 'fiction' can work as tricky kind of alibi. The bourgeois author pretends to have come across new lands in her imagination and plant her flag. Non-bourgeois fiction tries to do something else. I don't write fiction, so that's for someone else to tell.

In non-fiction, it's maybe a question of not treating one's subjects as sites of extraction. Its hard, and all nonfiction writers do that, inc me. We're all inside the commodity form. But one can at least worry away at it from within.

And the inverse is trying not to make property claims based on one's own pain that extends too far beyond it. As in "my life is sad for this particular reason so its all over for all you b!tches." Where you replace the other's actual pain with your own and judge them from it.

And to declare an interest: this is why I think autofiction is *not* memoir or autobiography. Duras, Dustan, Guibert all in different ways thought about this stuff. They got it that the form had to be different, for something like these reasons.

And at its best, I think new narrative also got it. Here were adaptations of form and literary distribution designed to not replicate the bourgeois property model in its entirety.

Now that both new narrative and autofiction have caught the eye of contemporary American bourgeois literary production, its important to stress that while these were internally contradictory literary forms, what's utopian in them might not survive recuperation.

What does this imply then when cis ppl write about trans ppl? Questions about whether its trading on other ppl's pain. And if so for what purpose. Are we an alibi or trope or are we in the text in some interesting way. Would we recognize ourselves in the text?

Does appropriating us into the text open an intertextual space we'd want to be in? Does the author actually know us, or anything about us? Does she read us? (In several senses of the word). How is our gift of ourselves being returned?

I'd really like it if cis ppl wrote about us, but where its actually us, rather than a fantasy of us that restores cis-ness to itself as unquestioned. And I'd rather they not write about us where it continues to exclude us from writing ourselves.

If you want our help not making dumb-ass mistakes in writing about us, the best way to make space for us to write. Or failing that, pay us to show you what we know. Since the former (which could be a gift) is rarely forthcoming, then the latter will have to do, by Venmo.

otoh wouldn't it be great if trans ppl got to write the bourgeois novel? Why should we be excluded from that? I can't point to all that many times it's even been attempted. That's why @torreypeters's Detransition, Baby will be an event.