ABSTRACT
Scholars of modernism recently have begun to articulate the centrality of trans figures among the forces that drove literary innovation in the first half of the twentieth century. The period in which modernist experimentation flourished coincided with developments in medical knowledge and technology through sexology that interrogated the boundaries of sex and gender, an intersection that not only led authors to include sensationalist accounts of transgender lives in literature but frequently found writers using trans experience to advance their formal experimentation. For example, Emma Heaney (2017) claims that transfeminity regularly operated as an allegory in modernism that allowed authors open new modes of representation through redefining the category of woman, and other key scholars have explored the ways modernist writers leveraged trans experiences to disrupt literary conventions, building on the work of a wide range of trans scholars including Susan Stryker, Jack Halberstam, Jay Prosser, and Gayle Salamon who interrogate the relationship between embodied experience and figuration. In this chapter, I will foreground works recovered through feminist, queer, and trans lenses, including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando ([1928] 1992), Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood ([1928] 1995), George Moore’s Albert Nobbs ([1918] 2011), and the biography of Lili Elbe, Man into Woman ([1933] 2020). This approach shows how more canonical modernist works that feature mythological transfeminine figures, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses ([1922] 1992), T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ([1922] 1971), and Guillaume Apollinaire Breasts of Tiresias ([1917] 2016) are also situated among what is a larger collection of contemporaneous trans narratives. In doing so, I trace two impulses in this chapter. The first explores how accounts of modernist literature are incomplete without being attuned to the centrality of trans experiences and characters even among the most canonical of works, while in turn illuminating how modernist formal experimentation inaugurates some of the tropes, styles, and metaphors we associate with representations of transition, gender nonconformity, and the complex relationship to medicalized techniques. Second, I investigate how this slippage of trans experience from the material to the metaphorical in modernist literature inaugurates arguments about the mediated access to the materiality of the body and the challenges of narrating trans experience that come to define the latter half of the century and our current moment.
