Theses and Dissertations Collection

In an interview with The Rumpus, author Lidia Yuknavitch explains her writing “brings the intensities and contradictions and beauty…and desire…of the body back into literature.” Yuknavitch’s corporality—centered on queer women’s bodies—is a new movement in transgressive writing, one author Kim Barnes calls “radical transparency.” It is in this vein of radical transparency that I’ve written “Two-Headed Girl.” “Two-Headed Girl” is a memoir of secrets. The memoir is divided into personal essays and each illuminate a different secret while providing a window to either express or bury that-which-wants-to-be-said. As a queer woman in a patriarchal, heteronormative culture, my secrets and their desirous underbellies are always non-normative and tied to my body. They exist in luminal spaces, therefore, each essay animates its landscape and characters with elements of the surreal and fairy tale as I unpeel and complicate shame, contradictory split selves, visibility, play, and the tumultuous desire for connection.