Between Becoming and Unbecoming: The Social Determinants of Queer Narrative in Torrey Peters and Akwaeke Emezi

Literary narratives of gender nonconformity are profoundly shaped by the geopolitical contexts that produce them. This comparative analysis of Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji argues that narrative form functions as a biopolitical index, registering the starkly different conditions for queer and transgender life in the United States and Nigeria. Peters’s domestic, psychologically realist novel of chosen kinship emerges from a milieu of conditional neoliberal inclusion, structuring a narrative oriented toward contested futurity. In stark contrast, Emezi’s elegiac, multi-perspectival mystery responds to a context of legislated homophobia and social erasure, necessitating a plot that begins with death and works backward. Through close reading, we trace a deterministic logic from ontology and embodiment to kinship and violence, demonstrating how these social pressures crystallize in narrative architecture. Synthesizing queer of color critique with narrative theory, this study proposes a model of relational reading that treats formal dissonance as a critical resource for transnational analysis. The comparison moves beyond thematic parallels to expose how the possibility of a future-oriented story is itself a measure of global inequality. Ultimately, this paper contends that attending to the geopolitics of form is essential for a transnational queer studies committed to understanding how power differentially structures the very possibility of being narrated. (211)