Writing Aslant: Cross-Gender Voicing in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Mussman, Mary; Mussman, Mary

This special session presents work at the intersection of nineteenth-century British literary studies and transgender studies. Drawing upon literary texts that take up the histories of cross-gender identification, our panelists examine the role of literary voices in working against predominant discourses around gender. How did literature, our session asks, allow Victorian writers to enact, in the words of Susan Stryker, “a critique of the conditions that cause transgender phenomena to stand out in the first place, and that allow gender normativity to disappear into the unanalyzed, ambient background”? It has been nearly half a decade since Ardel Haefele-Thomas—one of our panelists—edited “Trans Victorians,” the spring 2018 special issue of Victorian Review calling upon scholars of the nineteenth-century to consider gender discourses beyond a historically-imposed gender binary. Our session proves the enduring relevance of that call.

Beyond simply contributing to extant scholarship about trans Victorian writing, “Writing Aslant: Cross-Gender Voicing in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” narrows its purview to consider the particular work of literary voices in nineteenth-century Britain that sit “aslant” of gender discourses in the aesthetic, legal, and scientific spheres. Mary Mussman and Margaret Speer, the session’s organizers, are coediting a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies on this theme; this panel anticipates that collection of essays by offering a forum for dialogue off the page. Our session brings together critical interventions by established scholars, including Haefele-Thomas, with those of early-career researchers. We are limiting our session to three panelists in order to allow for as lively a discussion as possible, with plenty of time for conversation with our audience; Mussman will moderate the session as the presider and Speer will act as the panel’s respondent.

Shyam Patel will open with a discussion of Victorian literary writing’s critique of gendered discourse in the broader field of aesthetic cultural production. In “‘He–I–or we’: Gender, Medium, and Ekphrasis in Michael Field’s Sight and Song,” Patel will analyze the ekphrastic poems of Sight and Song, an 1892 collection by Michael Field, masculine nom de plume of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. In Sight and Song, Bradley and Cooper assume the role of ekphrastic poet to express their own gender inversion (as women who disidentify as women), highlight the pleasures of womanhood (erotically and ontologically), and rewrite heterosexist patterns in art criticism. Patel’s paper addresses a major fault line in literary-critical interpretations of the effeminate dandyism and male homosociality of fin-de-siècle Aestheticism, intervening in critical debates between emphasis on male aesthetes’ barring of women from artistic creation and appreciation (e.g., Rita Felski) versus focus on lesbian aesthetes’ cross-gender identifications with dandies and effeminate men (e.g., Martha Vicinus, Jessica Feldman).

Turning from aesthetic debates to legal concerns, Ardel Haefele-Thomas will examine texts by transmasculine writer and dandy Vernon Lee written in the late 1880s into the late 1890s, a period when British law was sharply focused on the perceived threat of male homosexuality. “Decadent Ghosts: Vernon Lee’s Queer Masculinity and Textual Hauntings” begins from the insight that the majority of Lee’s spectral tales were published in the same period that British anti-sodomy laws came into effect: these laws haunted Lee, whose closest bonds and affiliations were with gay men, emerging in Lee’s short fiction and essays in recurring figures of ghosts. Engaging with contemporary work by Avery E. Gordon and Angela Leighton, Haefele-Thomas will delineate how Lee’s ghosts represent, in literary terms, the damage of a legal fixation in Britain on “gross indecency.”

The panel’s final paper will weave together literary writing and with nineteenth-century scientific discourses around gender. In “On Knowing Nature’s Syntax: Preliminary Cisness and Trans Potentiality in George Eliot’s Life and Work,” Alexis A. Ferguson argues that George Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, offers a trans epistemology that thwarted emerging scientific understandings of cisnormativity. Taking up Grace Lavery’s reading of Eliot’s realism as an “ethical injunction to re-sex the body,” Ferguson shows how this injunction applies to reading sex from and onto the physiological material of the body. Drawing out non-cis epistemologies of the sexed body in nineteenth-century contexts, Ferguson elucidates a central argument in Eliot’s writings: that knowledge of others is most ethically produced through a series of performative gendered acts, rather than through a presumed immanence of physiological sex.

These formal presentations will be followed by a response from Speer, whose research on Alfred Tennyson’s poetically and politically motivated cross-gender ventriloquism makes her particularly suited to drawing connections between papers while offering another facet of Victorian literary writing and gender discourses in advance of open discussion.

586 Writing Aslant: Cross-Gender Voicing in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Calls for Papers