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

365 Pages·2017·2.07 MB·English
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The New Woman The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how liter- ature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/fl ashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi- tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit- erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit- erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor A complete list of titles begins on p. 346. T he New Woman Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory Emma Heaney northwestern university press | evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2017. All rights reserved. Scrapbook image related to “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed” and The Ambisexual Art Dealer copyright © The Authors League Fund and St. Brides’ Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-P ublication Data Names: Heaney, Emma, author. Title: The new woman : literary modernism, queer theory, and the trans feminine allegory / Emma Heaney. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017. | Series: Flashpoints Identifi ers: LCCN 2017017682 | ISBN 9780810135536 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135543 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135 550 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Transgender people in literature. | Gender identity in literature. | Male-to-female transsexuals. | Modernism (Literature) | Queer theory. Classifi cation: LCC PN56.G45 H43 2017 | DDC 809.9335267—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017682 Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Note on Usage xiii Preface xv Introduction 3 Part I: The Modernist Allegory of Trans Femininity 1. The Development of the Allegory of Trans Femininity: Sexology, Gay Rights, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Modernism 23 2. Blooming into a Female Everyman: Feeling like a Woman in Joyce’s Ulysses 67 3. The Flesh That Would Become Myth: Barnes’s Suffering Female Anatomy and the Trans Feminine Example 99 4. Ceased to Be Word and Became Flesh: Trans Feminine Life Writing and Genet’s Vernacular Modernism 153 Part II: Materialist Trans Feminism against Queer Theory 5. A Triumphant Plural: Post-S tructuralism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine 203 6. Materialist Trans Feminism against Queer Theory 253 Notes 299 Works Cited 319 Index 333 Illustrations Figure 1. Page from Djuna Barnes’s personal scrapbook 106 Figure 2. Thelma Wood, circa 1932 147 Figure 3. Djuna Barnes, The Ambisexual Art Dealer 152 Figure 4. Article from the September 1973 issue of Moonshadow 254 Figure 5. List of trans liberation political organizations 262 Figure 6. Flyer promoting “Gay Women’s Free Spirit” 275 Acknowledgments One of the sorrows of writing a book over the course of a decade is having the knowledge slowly sediment in your body and mind that it takes a lot of resources to write a book. You mourn all the books left unwritten by people who did not have the time to write or the means to get their writing to you in your present. I would like to begin by ac- knowledging all those trans sisters and siblings in history whose names we don’t know, but whose existence made the world safer and more beautiful for all of us. Over the course of a decade, you marvel at those who were not supported by the structures of power (universities, news- papers, wealth) who nonetheless found a way to write, often because of other resources (friends, comrades, collectively produced newsletters and journals). I therefore would like to acknowledge all those who have capacitated each other in the production of trans feminist thought and political action. This book is the result of both kinds of support. It began life as a dissertation at the University of California, Irvine, under the direction of Dina Al-K assim, who reset my intellectual coordinates when I was twenty- four years old by giving me Fanon, Genet, and Spivak among others. I was lucky to study with Jennifer Terry in the Women’s Studies Department, who, at every step, has been a source of intellectual en- gagement, support, and inspiration. I thank Annettee Schlicter, who gra- ciously joined my committee and saw what I was doing before anyone ix

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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 Theor
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