“I Am Not Returning Home”: A Transgender Reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

Abstract

Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation (2014) takes the form of a field journal written by a character known as “the biologist.” It follows an expedition of four women into Area X, where monstrous creatures roam and all living things, including the biologist, undergo transitions as their DNA radically changes. This reading of the biologist’s journal presents it as not only a transition narrative but as a fictional transgender autobiography, sharing many similarities with the features of trans autobiography identified by Jay Prosser (1998). I argue that the biologist’s attempts to assert her identification of a topographical anomaly as the “tower” can be a metaphor for the struggle in trans autobiography for self-identification to be accepted as truth. Contextualizing Annihilation within current discourses in transecology, I make links to the rhetoric of blame on LGBTQIA+ people as the cause of environmental disasters. I conclude with a hopeful reading, which defies this blame, of the biologist’s statement that “I am not returning home,” as an ending of trans possibility. Trans people must constantly reassert and fight for our existence, so as a trans-identified scholar I hope to highlight transgender readings in unexpected places, showing that our experiences exist across all genres.