Subjugated Knowledges: Queer and Trans Spectrality in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

In “Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past,” Carla Freccero theorizes queer history as a process where the traumatic past haunts the present. Yet, as transgender studies scholars such as Jay Prosser and Viviane Namaste have noted, most queer theory has little to say about historical trans experience, fictional or otherwise. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of subjugated knowledges and Susan Stryker’s application of that theory to trans studies, this essay explores overlaps and tensions between subjugated knowledges and psychoanalytic theory and unearths a range of queer moments that could be considered subjugated, closeted, and/or repressed in Charles Maturin’s Romantic gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820): the closeting of queer history within the Melmoth family, Melmoth’s queer antisociality, and Alonzo Monçada’s simultaneous abjection and desubjugation of queer histories and spaces. Desubjugating and revealing the lived trans experience and trans imagery that lie behind and beneath such queer moments in the novel furthers the work of queer and trans history, shows that these phenomena have their own gothic literary histories, and suggests that queer and trans methodologies can work in tandem without effacing each other.