Chapter 7 - Transitioning Queer Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Summary

This chapter surveys queer theoretical investigations of nineteenth-century American literature while turning an eye to its future potential. Since the 1990s, the emergence of queer studies shifted focus away from the identitarian scope of lesbian and gay studies to one that engages queer acts, desires, objects, and temporality, to name a few. Queer offers a way out of that Foucaultian maxim, by which in the late nineteenth century the “homosexual became a species.” No longer needing to “know” if one was gay, the rest of the nineteenth century became ripe for a capacious engagement with bodies, affects, and desires. Despite this prominence in queer studies, trans studies is largely absent from early American literary studies. I argue that scholarly pushback on nineteenth-century sexology and its problematic theory of “inverts” has all but left the actual embodiments of those who thwarted gender to the wayside. Neither has the field confronted how nonwhite, brown, and Black people were marked via inversion, such as female hypermasculinity and male effeminacy. If queer studies revisited nineteenth-century literary texts with new vigor, this paper proposes the same through a trans studies reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Archibald Clavering Gunter’s A Florida Enchantment, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland.