Emma Heaney

Trans femininity is central to the canon of transnational twentieth-century gay novels across the century in which gayness solidified as an individual quality. From 1880 to 1980 the process of medicalization translated queerness from a gritty cultural milieu into a life narrative, from a working-class scene into a bourgeois secret. Through this process, homosexuality (defined by the sex of the object of desire) eclipsed inversion (defined by an irrepressible gender oddity) as the primary mode of understanding gay life. By the mid-twentieth century, transsexuality emerged as a distinct diagnostic category for gender difference. But even as the line between gay people and trans people became firm and bright, the gender implications of same-sex desire, the reality that the very concept of being a real man or real woman requires entry into what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality,” remained as a nervous component of bourgeois homosexual identity. This talk will argue that the gender-disordering effects of same-sex desire haunted the class of men-loving men and women-loving women who sought to name themselves and their love as perfectly normal. It is the reflection of this process––sometimes lovely, sometimes cruel—in the American mid-century that “The Ghost Cousins” will trace.

Emma Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies at NYU. Her first book, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern UP 2017) traces the medicalization of trans femininity and the uptake of the resulting diagnostic in works of literature and theory. Her edited collection, Feminism Against Cisness (Duke UP 2023), gathers essays by trans studies scholars that demonstrate the potential of feminist critique freed of the ideology that assigned sex determines sexed experience. Her current research derives a theory of the transformation of queer and trans identities from works of literature spanning the long twentieth century.

This lecture takes place in the context of Jasper J. Verlinden’s seminar on Contemporary Trans and Queer Poetry. All students and colleagues are warmly invited to join.

Place: Unter den Linden 6, Room 3059