ABSTRACT
Scholars characterize the European Enlightenment as the origin of possessive individualism, racial capitalism, colonial extraction, and the “mirror theory” of gender and sex—all inventions that historically denied personhood and resources to those who did not meet the demands of non-ambiguous maleness, whiteness, heteromasculinity, and relative financial independence. Yet Enlightenment literature contains many representations of subjects, lives, and experiences that refuse to conform to binary gender or to the belief that gender is inextricably tied to assigned sex. This chapter examines these representations while insisting on the importance of their historical specificity. At the same time, the chapter draws on Jordy Rosenberg’s speculative fiction and Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” to “stretch” eighteenth-century literary texts beyond the bounds set by racialized gender and colonialism and toward survival and care. Drawing on work in transgender studies as well as scholarship by historians of sex, gender, and empire, this chapter employs intersectional methods to analyze gender variance and nonconformity in Enlightenment literature. I argue that by viewing representations of eighteenth-century gender instability intersectionally, we can best evaluate the extent to which such instability resisted or served prevailing social, political, and economic demands. I interpret a variety of British and North American sources including, but not limited to, Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband (1746), based on the life of Charles Hamilton; the narrative of James Gray/Hannah Snell (The Female Soldier, 1750); and pornographic tales that imagine genital property as detachable and exchangeable. Across these examples we see that only some subjects are represented as capable of crossing—however temporarily—socially imposed boundaries of gender and sex. In these texts from the long eighteenth century, gender’s relation to self-expression, social responsibility, and power is multifaceted and complex.
