Transing Romanticism

Although Susan Stryker’s essay on Frankenstein appeared thirty years ago to help articulate Transgender Studies as a critical field, Romantic literary studies has continued to be largely silent on trans folx, trans studies, and its theory. This introduction probes some reasons for this reticence and previews the issue’s array of approaches to historical gender nonconformity and to transhistorical methods. As with Stryker’s “trans analytic,” reading movements away from and across assigned gender can help us redraw the period’s resistances to a male/female gender binary tied to Atlantic slavery. Likewise, a trans framework revises the period’s scientific medicalization of the sexed and racialized body, the entanglements among ecology, animality, and posthumanity, and finally the affects of inclusion, exclusion, and becoming. Perhaps a part of Romanticism has always been trans in its politicization of shifting bodies and nonconforming genders and its preoccupations with radical difference made gothically monstrous. While trans perspectives might afford the rewriting of the core narratives of Romantic-era debates about gender, it may very well be that gender transing and trans lives holistically reorient how we understand many of the core sociopolitical and conceptual changes of this period.