The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory

Description

The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory traces the use of the trans feminine as an allegorical figure, from the practice's origins in nineteenth-century sexology through writings in the fields of psychoanalysis, Modernist fiction, and contemporary Queer Theory. The book is the first to identify the process by which medical sources simplified the diversity of trans feminine experience into a single diagnostic narrative. It then demonstrates that this medical figure became an archetype for the "sexual anarchy" of the Modernist period in works by Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, and Jean Genet. Thus illuminating the trans feminine's Modernist provenance, the book examines foundational works of Queer Theory that resuscitated the trans feminine allegory at the end of the twentieth century. Insightful and seminal, The New Woman debunks the pervasive reflex beginning in the 1990s to connect trans experience to a late twentieth-century collapse of sexual differences by revealing the Modernist roots of that very formulation. Contents......Page 6 List of Illustrations......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Note on Usage......Page 14 Preface......Page 16 Introduction......Page 22 Part I: The Modernist Allegory of Trans Femininity......Page 40 1. The Development of the Allegory of Trans Femininity: Sexology, Gay Rights, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Modernism......Page 42 2. Blooming into a Female Everyman: Feeling like a Woman in Joyce’s Ulysses......Page 86 3. The Flesh That Would Become Myth: Barnes’s Suffering Female Anatomy and the Trans Feminine Example......Page 118 4. Ceased to Be Word and Became Flesh: Trans Feminine Life Writing and Genet’s Vernacular Modernism......Page 172 Part II: Materialist Trans Feminism against Queer Theory......Page 220 5. A Triumphant Plural: Post-Structuralism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine......Page 222 6. Materialist Trans Feminism against Queer Theory......Page 272 Notes......Page 318 Works Cited......Page 338 Index......Page 352