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The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters review – genre games and gender mischief
When Detransition, Baby hit the shelves in 2021, its success took readers on both sides of the Atlantic by surprise. Longlisted for the Women's prize and selected as one of the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century, Torrey Peters's debut novel was among the titles that defined the literary landscape of the Covid-19 pandemic. Finding herself in the crosshairs of a mounting culture war, Peters became one of the world's best known trans writers, seemingly overnight. Of course, this isn't the full picture. Before her international breakthrough, Peters had self-published two novellas, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, shifting enough copies for mainstream publishers to take an interest. Both appear in Stag Dance, along with two pieces written either side of Detransition, Baby: the title story and The Chaser. They make up an ambitious compendium of a decade in writing. 'In the future, everyone will be trans': Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is set in a plague-ravaged dystopia where humans can no longer make their own sex hormones. Society falls apart as various factions seek to synthesise and control the flow of replacement hormones taken from pigs. It's a wild and gruesome story, packed with action but economically detailed. The Chaser is a preppy campus romance of sorts, articulating the suffocating desires felt by a Quaker boarding school student for his girlish roommate: it subtly upsets many of our ideas around love and sexual awakening. The Masker tiptoes into murky waters where fetish, queer sexuality and transgender identity mingle, exposing some extremely queasy power dynamics. And the titular Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, follows the men as they prepare for their winter festivities. Due to the lack of women, some must volunteer to attend en femme, a strangely kinky tradition that naturally generates unexpected possibilities. It is by turns thrilling and wickedly funny, weaving together bloodthirsty monsters and insatiably horny lumberjacks. A million miles from the tedious pioneer tales of James Fenimore Cooper, it's still a surprise after Detransition, Baby's cosmopolitan comedy of manners. The book as a whole brings to mind Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire in the way it uses genre conventions to address bigger themes. Just as Enríquez's spooky tales channel the horror of Argentina's military dictatorship, Peters inhabits her own disparate genres – dystopia, romance, horror, historical – to weave a transhistorical web of gender non-conforming characters. There is nothing ragtag about this collection, despite its long span of writing and diversity of genre, because Peters is such a capable and considerate writer, skipping between modes with apparent effortlessness. The pieces are meticulously crafted; especially Stag Dance, with its deft pacing and almost operatic denouement. Moreover, it is clear she is having a great deal of fun: even when exploring serious issues around gender and sexuality, the writing is mischievous rather than sanctimonious. Peters seems to delight in complicating liberal identity politics, refusing ever to sanitise her work or narrow her focus, and glorying in some truly rollicking prose. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is published by Serpent's Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
New York Times
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Think Gender Is Messy? Wait Until You Read These Stories.
In an 1817 letter to his brothers, the poet John Keats defined the concept of negative capability as 'when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' This is a quintessential trait of a great writer, who must know everything but create characters who know nothing, or only the wrong things, or different things on different pages. In her discomforting new collection, 'Stag Dance,' Torrey Peters excels at this particular kind of unknowing. Hopscotching through genres and decades, Peters, across three short stories and a novella, summons up characters whose ideas about sex, gender and sexuality exist beyond (or before, or to the side of) our current orthodoxies. Set in the early 1900s, the titular novella explores what happens when a restless winter camp of 'timber pirates' decides to throw a gender-bending soiree. Any man can declare himself a 'skooch' for the night and be courted by the others, but when the biggest, ugliest lumberjack, Babe Bunyan, steps up first, it upsets the camp's surprisingly fragile hierarchy of manhood. Babe Bunyan knows the other men expect (and even want) Lisen, the youngest, slightest, most feminine axman to take the role of skooch. Bunyan's own desires are unclear even to him. He wants to play the skooch, and he wants the men to court him, but more than anything, Bunyan wants Lisen to recognize that they are the same in some essential way that he can't define. Plaintively, he wonders, 'How do you beg when you don't even know the words to beg with?' When this desire for sisterhood gets thwarted, the stag dance becomes a violent competition. 'We were rivals,' Bunyan reflects of his new dynamic with Lisen. That, in a way, is his dream achieved. Because 'to be rivals is to be something the same.' The other stories in 'Stag Dance' run a gamut of painful settings, from future dystopia, to girls' weekend gone wrong, to aborted boarding school romance. In her acknowledgments, Peters says that she wrote each tale 'to puzzle out, through genre, the inconvenient aspects of my never-ending transition — otherwise known as ongoing trans life — aspects that didn't seem to accord with slogans, 'good' politics, or the currently available language.' Strip away the (sometimes clunky) antiquarian diction, and it's not hard to see a parallel between Babe Bunyan and a modern queer person just coming out, fascinated, infuriated and a little in love with someone one step further on their gender journey. Peters excels at plumbing the murky hearts of queer people. Her characters betray one another and themselves, and occasionally end the world in their desire for revenge. They embrace feelings they're not supposed to have. Frequently they're tormented by external manifestations of aspects of themselves that they have yet to admit, define or find a way to love. In the most disturbing of the stories, 'The Masker,' two women at a trans and cross-dressing convention in Las Vegas plan to publicly humiliate a third attendee, who they feel is not legitimately queer, just a fetishist in a 'poreless silicone skin' suit. As with the lumberjacks of 'Stag Dance,' however, it's the similarity between the characters that brings the story to its inevitably cruel and heartbreaking conclusion. Krys, the narrator, hates how she's 'saddled with a stupid fetish or gender or whatever.' When her trans friend Sally points out 'the masker' at the convention and calls 'him' a 'pervert,' Krys is struck by 'the disturbing knowledge that comes from distinguishing in others the parts of yourself that you most hate.' Is she a fetishist, a trans woman, both, or neither — and who gets to decide? Ultimately, Krys must sacrifice either Sally or the masker, and in so doing, sacrifice part of herself. The collection will likely make readers of all genders uncomfortable. That's on purpose. Peters's characters are complicated, in pain, angry and unsure of their own identities or desires. Her award-winning first novel, 2021's 'Detransition, Baby,' also courted controversy, by centering a character whose gender was messy, unclear and still evolving. Peters is not interested in 'positive' representation; she's interested in authenticity. She wants to show that every part of the queer experience, even the disturbing parts, or the parts we don't understand, are worthy of being made into art. That includes jealousy, doubt and negative capability. A great Torrey Peters story feels like punching yourself in the face, laughing at the bleeding bitch in the mirror and then shamefacedly realizing you're aroused by the blood on your lips. The four pieces in 'Stag Dance' will leave you bruised, broken and wanting more.
