ABSTRACT
The periodization of a queer or trans eighteenth-century has been oriented around the before and after of “modern” binary identities. Considering the nonlinear and intersecting problematizations of gender, sexuality, and race, historians might reject collapsing a multitude of differences into single vectors of identity or locating diverse bodies on either side of the “modern.” This is especially urgent as eighteenth-century discourses, locating white, “modern” categories of gender in opposition to prior, pre-liberal hierarchies of status, legitimated invasion/dispossession of populations organizing gender, intimacy, and kinship in ways interpreted as savage, promiscuous, sodomitical, and confusing to patrilineal forms of inheritance.
