Renaissance Literature as Trans Literature

In her pioneering work Transgender History, Susan Stryker (2008) traces the origins of the transgender movement to the 1850s in the USA. The publication of the special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19 4, edited by Simone Chess, Colby Gordon, and Will Fisher heralds the rise of the early modern trans studies. Indebted to what Stryker and Aizura term as “Trans Studies 2.0,” the early modern trans field investigates iterations of trans experiences and their intersections with, for example animal and disability studies, ecocriticism, or critical race studies. This survey of Renaissance literature as trans literature provides an overview of the multiple instances of trans embodiment where the orthodoxy of the budding Renaissance subjectivity grounded in human exceptionalism and sharp gender binary is contested. The chapter first looks at the fungibility of gender in the popular and learned medical texts, such as Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrocosmographia (1615), and how the blurry medical consensus grappled with genderfluid and trans bodies. Then, several Renaissance texts, where the expected binary identity is subverted, are discussed. In particular, the author looks at more traditional cross-dressed heroines in Shakespeare’s As You Like It ([c. 1599] 2006) or Twelfth Night ([c. 1601] 2008) and contrasts them with more radical portrayals of the trans experience in Dekker and Middleton’s ([1611] 2012) The Roaring Girl, John Lyly’s Gallathea ([1588] 2017), Ben Jonson’s Epicoene ([1609] 2014), and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (1688). The European Renaissance, or, as it is nowadays more readily identified, the early modern period, has long been seen as a battleground for conflicting ideas on human subjectivity and gender identity. Although the seventeenth century, the age of the Cartesian Revolution, is marked by a growing fossilization of human’s subjectivity into a seemingly transparent, self-sufficient, and reasonable ideal of an ego housed in a male, physically able and white body, as I argue, Renaissance literature offers multiple instances where this standard is vigorously defied, redefined and transformed. This survey does not attempt to “recover” trans characters in literature but aims to “spark … in us the pleasure of recognition, identification, and empathy across time,” to use Simone Chess’s (2019, 244) words about the so-called “queer residue” carried by the Elizabethan and Jacobean boy actors throughout their entire careers. Following Chess (2019) and Muñoz (1996), I argue that numerous early modern characters carry trans “residue,” seen only when looked at through a trans lens.