The Transfeminine Review

Shael lives in a vast prison camp, a monstrosity developed after centuries of warfare and environmental catastrophe. As a young transfeminine person, they risk abject violence if their identity and love affair with Coe, an insurrectionary activist, are discovered. But desire and rebellion flare, and soon Shael escapes to Riverwish, a settlement attempting to forge a new way of living that counters the camp’s repression.

As the complexities of this place unfold before Shael, Disobedience asks: How can a community redress harm without reproducing unaccountable forms of violence? How do we heal? What might a compassionate, sustainable model of justice look like?

This is a remarkable work of queer and trans speculative fiction that imagines how alternative forms of connection and power can refuse the violent institutions that engulf us.

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Love, as Johnny Cash sang, is a burning thing.

It can inspire someone to move across borders, to learn a second language, or to make drastic changes in one’s life. But burning can also encompass you, take over your whole life, and leave you raw and pained. One dives into a relationship knowing that risk.

Risk runs throughout Daniel Sarah Karasik’s debut novel Disobedience.  Released last May, it’s an overlooked book worth discovering.  Set in a post-apocalyptic future, Disobedience is a parable about restorative justice, queer kinship, and the desire for revenge. It follows illicit love across borders and time, and shows us how society can use love to forge new ways of doing things, yet still hurt people in the process.

In this future, an enslaved population lives in a camp called Flint. Guarded by mysterious and vicious masters from a remote mountain community, forced to labour making wares for their guards whilst allowed almost nothing in return, they have no freedom of association or culture of their own, simply living as chattel slaves.

Love grows between a guard and an inmate: Shael, a labourer who lives between genders, and Coe, a butch guard who protects them from violence. They hook up by night in an abandoned part of Flint for rough sex and dream together of a better life outside the camp. When the opportunity to escape arises, they both take it but are separated: Coe back to the camp and Shael to Riverwash, a refugee camp that ekes out its existence in the wastelands. Here the refugees forge different ways of living: from its matriarchal leadership structure to a communally-mediated justice process², Riverwash is awash in fresh ideas.

Karasik’s book initially feels like a riff on young adult ideas but changes tack once Shael is living in Riverwash. Instead of a book about a young person surviving in a strange and terrible world, it becomes a meditation on restorative justice and alternate forms of leadership. Karasik explores how conflicts arise from the whole community deciding on punishment: as one character tells Shael, “There is no normal when it comes to trials. They’re messy.”

And there’s the way Riverwash’s leaders have to compartmentalize playing Flint against other, distant prison camps in a game of realpolitik. “It’s not inaccurate to say this place… is a pawn in the long cold war between the two,” one of the villagers tells Shael. “A splinter in Flint’s side, a drain on its resources.” What began as a love story between two people kept apart by society becomes an exploration of the society itself. 

All this worldbuilding comes at a cost: it’s sometimes hard to keep track of the smaller details, like Shael’s age as an unclear amount of time passes. Karasik may seem more interested in explaining alternative forms of living than they are with telling a linear story.

But stick with it. They’re on to something with this world they’ve created.

Disobedience explores the kinky love relationship between Coe and Shael and the way they explore power dynamics through BDSM and role play. When Karasik leans into this and explains Shael’s complicated feelings, their writing is at its best: “They won’t deny the violence in him, or romanticize it. But they also can’t deny that it’s entangled with parts of him they love, sides that give them pleasure. Give them hope.”

It’s hard not to read this book in the shadow of October 7th and the ongoing genocide in Gaza: a minority population controlled by systems of digital surveillance, a colonial power propped up by faraway regimes, and an indigenous culture stamped out. But even as the news grows more dire each day, Karasik’s book suggests an optimistic future is possible in Riverwash. In this future, the colonized break the master’s tools in order to free themselves: they disrupt shipments for supplies and infiltrate the camp’s security to shuttle people in and out, building a community of their own design.

With its mix of kinky queer love and an optimism that can’t be stamped out, Disobedience is a book that lingered in my mind long after I finished it. It’s a good debut from Karasik, whose sole previous publication was a book of poetry: Plentitude (Book*hug Press, 2022)³. The seeds of Disobedience’s themes were present in Plenitude, but Karasuk hadn’t yet fleshed them out. For example, in their manifesto poem “trans-socialist” Karasuk writes:

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as in the condition in which gender is transformed because it’s no longer mobilized to serve institutions of social domination

as in the condition in which gender is reborn as pure play.⁴

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This line about surpassing male privilege finds full expression in Riverwash: its feminine leadership structure and the way conflict is settled in the open between everyone, not just a deputized group of citizens. And to their credit, Karasuk goes deeper into the ways this system has flaws: the way Riverwash’s justice system can be derailed by egos and gossip, for example, like when an inquest into a violent incident spirals back on the accuser. 

Their themes of the pops up elsewhere, too: when Karasuk writes: 

To be a neoliberal is to generate the spectacle and disavow its character and function. To be a fascist is to generate it, become it, and adore it.

The contrast between real-world events happening in Gaza and the fictional camp of Flint highlights this commentary on neoliberalism: an enslaved population working for a capitalist society that exploits them for material gain – which, in turns, leads to hand-wringing from liberals who need double standards to maintain the status quo. 

Released mid-2024 from the Canadian indie Book*Hug Press, Disobedience was lost in the shuffle last summer. But it’s worth going back to as one of last year’s stronger debuts alongside Love/Aggression by June Martin⁵ and Still Life by Katherine Packert Burke. Karasuk’s love story is never as comic as Martin’s, nor as tied to the present moment as Burke’s, a parable both dark and hopeful. When they write of the entanglement of punishment and pleasure, it’s never judgemental or preachy. When they write about establishing  utopia, it’s never one without problems. And when they write about the connection between two souls, a love that exists outside of binaries or rigid societies, it’s one you want to believe in.

We may not live in the best of times, but Disobedience helped me believe that our world can and will get better. I hope it will for you, too.

– Roz Milner

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Roz Milner (she/her) is a freelance writer who has written for the Toronto Star, Lambda Literary, PRISM International, Full Stop, and many other places. She is currently working on a book of short fiction. She is not on social media. You can find more of reviews of trans literature on Muckrack.

1. Beth’s Notes: I was thrilled to publish this review, as I had never heard of Disobedience or Karasik before editing this review! Really goes to show that the field is big enough that whole indie releases can slip my radar. ↩︎
2. One of my editors brought up a really interesting point during revisions that there’s some First Nations influence here – I thought it was worth mentioning that Daniel Sarah Karasik is a co-founder of the group Artists for Climate & Migrant Justice and Indigenous Sovereignty, which you can find on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/acmjis/ ↩︎
3. More info about Plenitude: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58321023-plenitude ↩︎
4. You can read the full poem with commentary here: https://bookhugpress.ca/behind-the-poem-with-daniel-sarah-karasik/ ↩︎
5. Roz reviewed Love/Aggression here: https://www.liveinlimbo.com/2024/11/25/literature/love-aggression-june-martin-traum-books.html ↩︎