“More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 98; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030098
Received: 26 January 2021
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Revised: 18 August 2021
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Accepted: 19 August 2021
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Published: 26 August 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Queer Culture and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Clara Reeve’s (1729–1807) Gothic novel The Old English Baron is a node for contemplating two discursive exclusions. The novel, due to its own ambiguous status as a gendered “body”, has proven a difficult text for discourse on the Female Gothic to recognise. Subjected to a temperamental dialectic of reclamation and disavowal, The Old English Baron can be made to speak to the (often) subordinate position of Transgender Studies within the field of Queer Studies, another relationship predicated on the partial exclusion of undesirable elements. I treat the unlikely transness of Reeve’s body of text as an invitation to attempt a trans reading of the bodies within the text. Parallel to this, I develop an attachment genealogy of Queer and Transgender Studies that reconsiders essentialism―the kind both practiced by Female Gothic studies and also central to the logic of Reeve’s plot―as a fantasy that helps us distinguish where a trans reading can depart from a queer one, suggesting that the latter is methodologically limited by its own bad feelings towards the former.
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Keywords:
Clara Reeve; Female Gothic; trans; queer; gender; embodiment
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MDPI and ACS Style
Huthwaite, D. “More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve. Humanities 2021, 10, 98. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030098
AMA Style
Huthwaite D. “More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve. Humanities. 2021; 10(3):98. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030098
Chicago/Turabian StyleHuthwaite, Desmond. 2021. "“More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve" Humanities 10, no. 3: 98. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030098
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