Nineteenth-Century Trans Histories

Abstract This short forum piece engages trans studies scholarship that focuses on historical and current-day structures of surveillance to ask how we might conceptualize nineteenth-century histories of trans and gender-nonconforming experience. Building on scholarship that argues that the fundamental racialization of gender—and its surveillance and enforcement—produces forms of gendered and sexed marginalization that exceed contemporary, identity-based understandings of transgender, this piece turns to surveillance studies as one way of describing the broad, variegated, and not entirely trans history of trans experience in North America.