| FT-286503-22 | Research: Summer Stipends | Lisa Hager | Transgender Victorians: Reconceptualizing Gender Identities in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture | 6/13/2022 - 8/12/2022 | $6,000.00 | Lisa | | Hager | | | | University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee | Milwaukee | WI | 53211-3153 | USA | 2022 | British Literature | Summer Stipends | Research | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 | Research and writing leading to a book theorizing Victorian gender identities through literature and authorial biography.
The central argument of this book project is twofold. Firstly, we, as humanities scholars, must fundamentally reconceptualize our understanding of nineteenth-century gender to account for the possibility of movement between, across, and among genders. Secondly, we must use this understanding to consider the possibilities of trans narratives within the diversity of gender identities represented throughout Victorian literary culture. In making room for transgender studies’ understanding of gender and sex as multiple, changeable, and constructed, the book’s trans-inclusive vision of Victorian gender identities demonstrates how the categories of woman and man were being constructed and revised throughout the century. Furthermore, it foregrounds how the oppositional, binary discourse of gender necessarily reveals its own contradictions in the form of bodies and genders that refuse to fit into one of only two gender identities. |