Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther afield--more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown. Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity with the regional culture and with the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness. In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover writes transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogates the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Together, her essays investigate how the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and the ways in which the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.