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

365 Pages·2017·2.07 MB·English

by  Emma Heaney

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