Where and when does the history of something called “queer American literature” begin? This chapter will not attempt a comprehensive answer to this question – if indeed such a thing is even possible. Instead, it uses one particular eighteenth-century transatlantic popular-print genre as a case study for how “queer American literature” as a category relates to origin stories: those of the nation, those of “American literature,” those of “modern” queer and trans identities.

The genre I investigate – the Anglophone transmasculinity narrative in the long eighteenth century – is not at all representative of “early American literature,” which was multilingual, multimedia, and encompassed many interconnected literacies that included but extended far beyond print.Footnote ¹ It is also not representative of the vast range of experiences, embodiments, social/economic formations, and cultural practices that comprise the histories of gender and sexuality in colonial North America and in the early United States.Footnote ² While it is far from representative, however, it offers a compelling case study of a genre that can seem spectacularly hyperlegible for contemporary identification, even as the texts themselves frequently confound the drive for queer/trans identification in the present. It is also a genre that was spectacularly hyperlegible in its own time; readers sought out and recognized this as a coherent narrative genre defined specifically by its emphasis on gender transformation, which was very frequently accompanied by desire, seduction, eroticism, sex, and/or romance that took varied, often nonheterosexual forms. Genre recognition extended to the reading not just of texts, but also of lives and social worlds as mediated through print. For instance, when the Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser printed news from Scotland in 1790 of the “curious circumstance” of a “soldier lass” who served for eight years in the army, received a pension, and “still wears men’s clothes,” the author goes on to add a story of another “female husband” in England.Footnote ³ The appended account of “James Han” is clearly the story of James Howe, whose biography had circulated throughout the British press since 1766.Footnote ⁴ Appending this old story to the new one implies that the “soldier lass,” however “curious,” is in fact not singular at all, but rather an example of a readily recognizable type.

This is thus an excellent example of the kind of print-culture phenomenon that Christopher Looby proposes as the “literariness of sexuality”; as he argues, “sexual identities (or labels or categories or scripts) need to be articulated, promulgated, circulated, and encountered in order to be received and adopted and performed, and this requires a literary public sphere.”Footnote ⁵ But as Danielle Skeehan argues, the largely nineteenth-century public sphere Looby addresses here also contains within it complex remediations of earlier documents, genres, and histories. By tracing the nineteenth-century circulation of a (purported) eighteenth-century transcription of a seventeenth-century queer/trans memoir – the now-well-known story of Catalina de Erauso – Skeehan argues that while Erauso was a participant in the Spanish colonization of the Americas, Erauso’s translated popular-print afterlife in nineteenth-century Anglophone newspapers became a tool of US empire-building in Mexican territory and beyond.Footnote ⁶ The texts I examine here cohere generically not only around gender and sexuality, but also around nation- and empire-building; indeed, they offer a clear example of how, as Scott Lauria Morgensen argues, “modern sexuality arises in settler societies as a function of the biopolitics of settler colonialism.”Footnote ⁷

The genre I am calling the eighteenth-century transmasculinity narrative is not the origin of either queer or trans American literature, whatever either of those terms might mean. However, this genre is a crucial model for the ways that sexuality and gender came to be narrative genres in a print/public sphere with privileged relations to intertwined origin stories of the nation, American literary history, and modern queer/trans identities – and a very useful case study in the limits of looking for queer/trans representation in the genres that seem most readily assimilable into a legible prehistory of “queer American literature.”

The Anglophone Transmasculinity Narrative in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

Narratives of spectacularized transmasculinity saw wide circulation in transatlantic Anglophone popular print of the long eighteenth century. Sometimes referred to as “passing-woman” narratives, sometimes referred to as the subgenres of “female husband,” “female soldier,” and “female sailor” stories, these accounts formed their own recognizable and coherent narrative genre.Footnote ⁸ As Dianne Dugaw’s foundational scholarship has shown, a formidable early modern “warrior woman” English ballad tradition proliferated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reaching a peak of transatlantic popularity in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁹ The eighteenth century is also when the transmasculinity narrative expands beyond the ballad to increasingly ubiquitous prose narratives such as (actual or purported) biographies and newspaper accounts.Footnote ¹⁰ Transmasculinity plots arise in a number of texts we now approach under the aegis of transatlantic Anglophone “literature.” Aphra Behn’s The Widdow Ranter (1689) portrays its eponymous, breeches-clad widow as emblematic of colonial Virginia’s potential to foster radical social mobility and transformation. John Gay’s Polly (1729), the sequel to The Beggar’s Opera (1728), similarly invokes the Atlantic as a space for transformation as the play’s setting in the West Indies features Macheath in blackface and Polly Peachum in men’s clothing. Mid-eighteenth century Britain abounded with popular accounts of transmasculinity, many of which were read and reprinted in the American colonies for decades.Footnote ¹¹ By the time early American literary texts such as the anonymous The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1794), Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), or Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond (1799) draw on transmasculine plots, they incorporate narrative beats, strategies, and tropes that would have been deeply familiar to their readers from transatlantically circulating genres including biography, newspapers, ballads, and novels. There is no equivalent “transfemininity narrative” that cohered and circulated as a popular genre in this period. To be sure, there are eighteenth-century histories and narratives of transfemininity across a wide array of archives, literary and otherwise. However, figures like the “female husband,” the “female soldier,” and the “female sailor” signaled entire narrative genres in a way that figures like the molly did not.

These texts bear a complicated relation to queer literary history. On the one hand, they have the capacity to surprise readers – especially in the undergraduate classroom – expecting a much more uniformly heterosexual eighteenth century than what actually exists on the page. You don’t need to read for open secrets or think through the epistemology of the closet when the Life and Adventures of Christian Davies (1740) has its “female soldier” protagonist recount:

However, in a trope that recurs across this genre, Davies/Welch characterizes their seduction of the burgher’s daughter as motivated by something other than the kind of interiorized, “authentic” desire that a model of congenital sexuality might look for.Footnote ¹³ The “tender Nonsense” is here described as utterly insincere, and Davies/Welch will later go to great lengths to avoid marrying the burgher’s daughter when the “Nonsense” ends up working all too well and the situation becomes one of many crises for Davies/Welch’s continued ability to pass as male.Footnote ¹⁴

At the same time, though, this is also a scene of queer pleasure – not despite its stated insincerity, but precisely because of it. Davies/Welch’s “Frolicks, to kill Time” are intended to produce pleasure in the moment, not marriage or reproduction later on. Furthermore, the text proposes that having been seduced as a woman makes you an expert in how to seduce women. Whether texts view this possibility with titillation or bemusement (as this one does) or with intense anxiety (as Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband [1746] does), this dynamic recurs: texts often portray transmasculinity not as falling short, but as more successful than masculinity arrived at through other means, particularly when it comes to inducing women’s desire.

These texts pose a paradoxical challenge to both queer and trans readings; they seem to promise unusually clear potential queer and trans recognition, yet are frequently stubbornly incongruent with contemporary queer- and trans-studies reading practices and political commitments. They also stage tensions between queer and trans readings; while their queer and trans potential need not be read as mutually exclusive, it is nonetheless necessary to at least partially dislodge some of these texts’ histories of being read as archives for straightforwardly or uncomplicatedly “lesbian” or “women’s” histories in order to take them seriously as narratives of transmasculinity (rather than the more commonly used generic labels of “cross-dressing narratives” or “passing-woman narratives.”)Footnote ¹⁵

Their extremely common convention of titling – The Female Soldier, The Female Shipwright, The Female Porter of Shoreditch, The Female Husband, The Female Marine – advertises gender multiplicity and transformation as the centerpiece of their popular appeal. After all, these texts’ titles imply, the account of a soldier, a shipwright, or husband is only worthy of readerly interest because the soldier, shipwright, and husband in question got to these positions through an extraordinary path: one that started with the assignment of “female.”

However, the centrality of contingency and strategy in how these texts narrate both public gender and sexual behavior has posed challenges to an easy assimilation of these texts into many forms of contemporarily legible notions of queer or trans identity. In particular, their portrayal of both gender and sexual activity as contingent and situational has posed some of the dilemmas that Benjamin Kahan, Regina Kunzel, and Sara Ahmed have noted in theories of sexuality that are occluded or “left behind” in historical accounts that privilege a shift toward congenital sexual identity and orientation.Footnote ¹⁶ Even after decades of “anti-identitarian” queer studies, texts like these have seemed less amenable to anti-identitarian celebration, perhaps because their frequent emphasis on desire as contingent, situational, and strategic often does not read as radical, but rather as all too complicit in the imposition of heteropatriarchal narrative closure and the valorization of colonial military masculinity. Indeed, as Ellen Malenas Ledoux has recently argued, these texts are perhaps best understood as early consolidations of homonationalism.Footnote ¹⁷ Herman Mann’s The Female Review (1797), for instance, fashions the “female soldier” Deborah Sampson/Robert Shurtliff into an origin story for the new nation, while at the same time using Sampson/Shurtliff to embody the legacy of English colonial histories that were repurposed for early US nation-building: he names Sampson/Shurtliff as a descendant of William Bradford, and insistently figures Sampson/Shurtliff’s gender transgressions as emblematic of the revolutionary energies that forged the new nation.Footnote ¹⁸

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers recognized and sought out this genre as one that cohered not only through its type of protagonist, but also through its engagements with social reproduction, resource distribution, biopolitics, and colonial warfare. The transmasculinity narrative is centrally concerned with social and economic transformation and mobility. As Susan Lanser has argued, “sapphic picaresque” novels published throughout eighteenth-century Europe used the physical and economic mobility enabled by transmasculinity in order to stage nonheterosexual alternatives to the marriage plot and the emerging genre of domestic fiction it anchored.Footnote ¹⁹ When this genre invokes or crosses the Atlantic, it situates the spectacle of remarkable, mobile masculinity in broader questions that had particular purchase for Britain’s Atlantic colonies over the course of the long eighteenth century, and for the United States’s reconfiguration of empire in its early decades: the management of labor and populations across empire, the intertwining of physical mobility and economic transformation, the growth of print-mediated surveillance that sought to locate consistent, trackable identity in the body, the importance of gender and reproduction in both the ideologies and practices of settler-colonial dispossession, and the imaginative place of the American colonies as a privileged space for reinvention and advancement for European settlers.

The transmasculine figure was a crucial one for imagining transatlantic biopolitics, often embodying aspects of transformability long associated specifically with white masculinity in a settler colony. Beginning in the seventeenth century and intensifying with the Transportation Act of 1718, the North American colonies were, in Britain, a privileged space for imagining the transformation of the criminalized poor into upwardly mobile and virtuous contributors to the empire’s wealth.Footnote ²⁰ At the same time, European and colonial natural historians saw North America as a site of radical transformability for people, plants, animals, and even climate.Footnote ²¹ As Kyla Schuller argues, the idea of whiteness as a particularly malleable mode of embodiment is crucial to the emergence of biopolitics.Footnote ²² This malleability of whiteness is rooted in a sense of its colonizing portability and in the settler-colonial stakes of asserting its superior adaptability to “new” lands and climates. The texts I trace as constituting the “transmasculinity narrative” as a recognizable transatlantic genre are uniformly about white protagonists, and their whiteness is not incidental, but structurally central to the genre as one that spectacularizes social mobility and transformation, labor, and frequently either military or maritime nation-building. As Jen Manion notes, the genre as a whole, with its emphasis on the acquisition of “the privileges and freedoms of men,” necessarily upheld “whiteness as the primary identity and vehicle for gender transgression.”Footnote ²³ Thus, the genre is arguably more representative for the history of whiteness than it is for the history of either queer or trans imaginative or embodied life in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.Footnote ²⁴

In both British and American texts throughout the century, transmasculinity is frequently staged as a heightened spectacle of maritime and/or military mobility, and thus maintains a close relation to the forms of warfare and labor that materially made the eighteenth-century Atlantic world as such. In Constantius and Pulchera, for instance, Pulchera experiences the Atlantic as both a space of gender transformation (taking on a male persona to escape the threat of sexual violence once her ship is captured) and as a densely populated network of transimperial social and economic relations, as multiple ships flying the flags of multiple nations become the scenes of improbably “coincidental” reunions and recognitions of fellow white Americans in transit.

The texts, now studied under the aegis of “early American literature,” that refer back to this tradition are often the very same texts that seem to offer rare glimpses of queer possibility in an early national literary culture that can otherwise look relentlessly heterosexual.Footnote ²⁵ In what follows, I will focus on some key features of the transmasculinity narrative that predated and influenced these texts, offered the generic blueprint that authors like Brown and Tenney absorbed into their plots, and continued to circulate as a distinct genre into the nineteenth century. The ubiquity and coherence of this genre show that the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in fact abounded with imaginative possibilities for lives, embodiments, and narrative genres that can be read as queer and/or trans, and simultaneously remind us that looking for legible queer or trans narrative in this period may not necessarily align with the desire for texts that offer queer or trans political possibility, identification, or material well-being in the present.

Gender as Labor in the Transmasculinity Narrative

The eighteenth-century transmasculinity narrative is foundationally a genre about class, labor, and social mobility.Footnote ²⁶ When the author of The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, for instance, characterizes Davies/Welch as possessing “inclinations” that were “always masculine” from childhood, the text nonetheless also illustrates these “inclinations” through gendered labor, as Davies/Welch recounts “the Pleasure I took in manly Employments; for I was never better pleased than when I was following the Plough, or had a Rake, Flail, or Pitchfork in my Hand.”Footnote ²⁷ Meanwhile, in The Life and Imaginations of Sally Paul (1760), the author has its protagonist, upon being arrested for defrauding their wife by passing as a man, cheekily (though falsely) assert an androgynous embodiment acquired from their transatlantic labor as a sailor: “I am by an accident neither the one, nor the other; I owe this to a shark in the West-Indies.”Footnote ²⁸ The Female Adventurer (1820), even as it hearkens back to the early modern ballad tradition in portraying heterosexual romance as the motivator for its protagonist Cordelia’s gender-crossing, nonetheless still emphasizes the materiality of “female” as an economic subject position: “What to do I knew not. I could not labour as a man, and had not money enough to enable me to appear as a woman.”Footnote ²⁹

Gender, in these texts, is both a relation to labor and a kind of labor in its own right: a skilled craft requiring both the right tools and the acquisition of embodied know-how.Footnote ³⁰ The craft of masculinity in these texts is frequently described in terms that resonate with Margaret Cohen’s account of the “mariner’s craft” as a form of embodied, pragmatic reason that engages the reader’s practical imagination.Footnote ³¹ Protagonists improvise with found, inherited, or stolen clothing, learn the skills of masculine labor with added alacrity, and face repeated situations in which continued passing requires quick thinking to give a plausible story, perform labor convincingly well, or navigate a risky social or sexual encounter – all of which add a heightened narrative tension to scenes of everyday life in the army, aboard a ship, or in other spaces of masculine labor.

Because so many of these texts are themselves maritime adventures, their protagonists also frequently learn the craft of masculinity alongside and as the “mariner’s craft.” For instance, Mary Ann Talbot/John Taylor is described as learning the endurance of physical hardship as sailor’s work and the precondition of passing:

Using clothing, the acquisition of new physical skills, feigned ignorance of feminine-coded skills, and adept navigation of social situations, the protagonists of these texts are shown constantly making use of their improvisational craft, and the texts frequently revel in this practical ingenuity as the engine for readerly interest, as the ordinary navigation of masculinity’s labors and social relations take on heightened narrative stakes. For instance, The Female Soldier (1750) describes Hannah Snell/James Gray’s concealment of a bullet wound as an occasion for particular admiration: “The Reader will here observe, the invincible Courage and Resolution of this Woman, who, in the midst of so many Inconveniences as she daily encounter’d, should still be able to guard from a Discovery of her Sex; but indeed it appears she acted so artfully on every Emergency … .”Footnote ³³ This incident is described not only as an occasion for patriotic admiration, but also a moment in which readers can take pleasure in a protagonist’s virtuosic skill in “act[ing] so artfully on every Emergency.” Meanwhile, Snell/Gray’s skill at navigating the desires of women is similarly portrayed in terms of skill and ingenuity, describing “some secret Amours, which required no small Dexterity and Address in our Heroine to get clear of.”Footnote ³⁴ Meanwhile, The Female Marine takes practical craft to a logical extreme by citing this print tradition as a usable instruction manual: “I had thoroughly studied the memoirs of Miss Sampson, and by a strict adherence to the precautionary means by which she was enabled to avoid an exposure of her sex, I was too enabled to conceal mine.”Footnote ³⁵

Throughout these texts, gender is explicitly described as a relation to labor, wages, and subsistence. In The Surprising Adventures of Almira Paul (1816) – the likely fictional account of a “female sailor” published in Boston by Nathaniel Coverly in the wake of the immense popularity of the Female Marine texts of the previous year – Paul becomes a sailor after the death of their seafaring husband leaves them “in very indigent circumstances, with two children, yet too young to earn their bread.”Footnote ³⁶ Their transformation from devoted mother to fun-loving and flirtatious sailor is attributed to the literal wages of masculinity: “As my wages amounted to considerable, like a real bred tar, I now felt a disposition to enjoy myself for a short time, at least, on shore.”Footnote ³⁷ It is the sailor’s wage and labor here that produce Paul’s internalized, felt, and habitual masculinity. When Paul is forced to resume female dress as a disguise, to escape prosecution for desertion, this second gender transformation poses a dilemma for labor and subsistence: “But, in my true character, how was I now to procure a humble subsistence among strangers?”Footnote ³⁸ Even as Paul describes their feminine dress as their “true character,” their time as a sailor has nonetheless altered their gendered relation to labor, as this experience had “rendered me less able and less disposed to perform work better adapted to more delicate hands.”Footnote ³⁹ Their turn to sex work – the profession of spectacularized female “fall” in many texts, including The Female Marine – is portrayed here as continuous with maritime labor and the association with sailors as a sailor, and indeed, even embeds Paul’s male name in the account: “I had become so habituated to their customs and manners, that I must indeed acknowledge, I even yet felt a disposition to associate with them. Thus disposed, and a willing inhabitant of a neighborhood (Fells-Point) where prostitution bears unlimited sway, it would be absurd for me to impute the first cause of my immoral life, to fatal seduction, as many probably with less propriety have done – no! of virtue, RATLING JACK made a voluntary sacrifice!”Footnote ⁴⁰

The Female Shipwright, first published in England in 1773 and reprinted in New York in 1807, similarly narrates Mary Lacy/William Chandler’s gender transformations as relations to labor, and the text is frequently most interested in the particularities of administrative and legal gender when it concerns matters such as wages, pensions, and apprenticeship. For instance, in narrating the completion of their apprenticeship, Lacy/Chandler notes: “I then carried the certificate to the Clerk of the Cheque’s office, where I was entered as a man,” and devotes more energy to narrating their attempts to gain a pension than their eventual return to female clothing, which is noted only retrospectively and with little narrative detail.Footnote ⁴¹ In some prominent cases, the texts themselves were part of their subjects’ strategies to gain military pensions; in the cases of Snell/Grey and Sampson/Shurtliff, access to the wages of masculinity is a central imperative not only for the events narrated within the text, but for every aspect of these texts themselves, from their authorship to their circulation to their relation to their subjects’ ongoing business ventures and public personae.Footnote ⁴²

Gender as labor need not preclude gender as embodied, felt, or desired; indeed, while contemporary medical and legal gatekeeping can rely on a distinction between gender as authentic selfhood and gender as relation to subsistence, these texts rarely presume such a distinction. Their protagonists assert gender as a relation to labor and as a site of desire, embodied experience, and transformation, rarely registering any sense of contradiction in this juxtaposition. When Almira Paul declares that “of virtue, RATLING JACK made a voluntary sacrifice,” the claim of free choice brushes up against the frank assertion that they had few actual options for subsistence. At the same time, their self-identification as “Jack” prominently graces their entry into the profession that they took up precisely because they could not safely use the name or identity of “Jack” anymore. Paul’s life as a sailor is inaugurated by pure exigency, but when Paul comes to experience masculinity as an interiorized habit and “disposition” that carries with it a liking for both the labor and sexual leisure that sailors experience, the text makes no comment, registers no need to explain, and seems to presume its readers will not question the coexistence of these relationships to masculinity.

Atlantic Metamorphoses: Embodiment, Settlement, Biopolitics

When these narratives received a particular flood of scholarly attention in the 1990s and early 2000s, Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber were common theoretical touchstones for accounts of these texts and debates about their relative transgressiveness.Footnote ⁴³ Butler’s theoretical deployment of drag has long oriented trans-studies critiques of queer theory’s limitations as an approach to trans embodiment.Footnote ⁴⁴ For instance, in questioning the glibness of some contemporary redeployments of Shakespearean characters like Viola as “trans,” Sawyer Kemp remarks that the theatrical work of costume on the early modern stage is an exceedingly poor analogue for the social and embodied work of passing, and argues that “we need to challenge our scholarship to locate transgender identity in something other than clothing.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Unlike the costumes of early modern theatre, however, clothing in eighteenth-century transmasculinity narratives rarely accomplishes the job of gender transformation with instantaneous ease; rather, clothing is described as just one of many techniques and tools of masculinity, and these texts also frequently register lasting transformation – or “metamorphosis,” to use a word that recurs in the genre – that encompasses bodily shape, manner, personality, habit, and inclination toward male-coded forms of labor and sociality.

These texts’ engagements with gender were never reducible to the “cross-dressing” that scholars have often used as a shorthand for the genre itself. While these narratives do frequently figure the body as that which threatens revelation and clothing as a technology of fictionality, this figuration often coexists in the same texts with a sense of the body as itself malleable, affectable, and transformable. For instance, the preface to the Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies describes Davies/Welch as permanently altered by their previous life as a man: “By her having been long conversant in the Camp, she had lost that Softness which heightens the Beauty of the Fair, and contracted a masculine Air and Behaviour.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Meanwhile, the editor’s note to Talbot/Taylor’s narrative concludes: “In the subject of these pages, if long habits of association had blighted the delicacy and modesty which are such ornaments to a female; she had nevertheless contracted (if however she did not possess from nature) all that blunt generosity of spirit and good-nature peculiar to British seamen. … She retained, notwithstanding her long metamorphosis, much of the sensibility of her sex.”Footnote ⁴⁷ While “metamorphosis,” in this text, is used to describe Talbot/Taylor’s masculinity, the narrative of Lacy/Chandler uses “metamorphosis” to describe their return to female dress, labor, and social identity, suggesting that such a return is not a seamless resumption of naturalized “true” sex, but rather a form of further transition.Footnote ⁴⁸

In The Female Review, Mann describes Sampson/Shurtliff at the moment of writing, cataloguing their body in an idiom of gendered characteristics: “Her aspect is rather masculine and serene, than effeminate and sillily jocose. Her waist might displease a coquette: but her limbs are regularly proportioned. Ladies of taste considered them handsome, when in the masculine garb.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This statement sends the reader to a footnote at the bottom of the page, which speculates that Sampson/Shurtliff’s sexed embodiment was acquired: “She wore a bandage about her breasts, during her disguise, for a very different purpose from that which females wear round their waists. It is not improbable, that the severe pressure of this bandage served to compress the bosom, while the waist had every natural convenience for augmentation.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Mann both describes Sampson/Shurtliff’s body as remarkable and presumes that all bodies are malleable: he speculates that Sampson/Shurtliff’s “masculine” appearance, even in women’s clothing, may have been the result of a body permanently reshaped by a history of binding, but this distinction is also just as much the result of more conventionally “feminine” women’s body-modification in materially analogous terms, as the same “bandage” is described as creating both Sampson/Shurtliff’s flat chest and the kind of waist a “coquette” might wish to have.

This attention to embodied transformation is unsurprising, as it reflects eighteenth-century European notions of bodily malleability and permeability to the environment – indeed, the “European” body in colonial spaces was figured as a particularly privileged ground for transformation, a prospect that occasioned both anxiety for the stability of whiteness and the valorization of whiteness as grounds for mobility and adaptation.Footnote ⁵¹ As Greta LaFleur has argued, Mann is particularly engaged with questions of climate and transformation in natural history, as he figures Sampson/Shurtliff as the product of the North American environment and thus the embodiment of an “indigenized” whiteness that distinguishes the new nation from Britain.Footnote ⁵²

In foregrounding gender transformation as and alongside physical mobility, these texts anticipate some features of the twentieth-century and contemporary genre of the transition narrative – in particular, the metaphor of transition “not only as a journey through gendered space but as a kind of social mobility, premised on success and heroic acts of self-transformation” that Aren Aizura characterizes as the genre’s inheritance of the colonial travel narrative.Footnote ⁵³ For the eighteenth-century transmasculinity narrative, gender and mobility are not metaphorically, but literally linked. These texts understand gender as a relation to physical mobility, local belonging, and relations between fixity, movement, and displacement – which is what all gender was for the projects of colonization and empire-building in eighteenth-century North America.Footnote ⁵⁴

While these texts seem at first to emphasize the spectacular transformation of an extraordinary individual, they invoke theories of bodily malleability that are ultimately far more universalizing than minoritizing, especially in figurations of whiteness in the Atlantic world.Footnote ⁵⁵ Similarly, when these texts figure transmasculinity as spectacular mobility, they invoke not only the mobility of a radically self-willed individual, but the larger backdrop of mass transatlantic mobility that, as Charlotte Sussman argues, occurred across a spectrum of unfreedom and was crucial to the development of “population” as the central object and medium of biopower – and thus also to the emergence of modern sexuality as Foucault characterizes it.Footnote ⁵⁶

If contemporary readers are accustomed to taking the “female” that recurs in many of these texts’ titles as naming a sexed body, I want to suggest that in the texts themselves, “female” frequently just as insistently names their protagonists’ structural relations to settlement, property, economic precarity, and social reproduction. While earlier ballads in the genre frequently named heterosexual romance as a primary driver for the “woman warrior,” the eighteenth-century prose narratives frame these relationships in far more practical terms, frequently naming the financial impact of a missing or dead husband as a crucial initial motivator for gender crossing. When these texts use “female” to indicate what Susan Stryker has influentially termed the “unchosen starting place” of gender transformation, they are also embedding the entire trajectory of transformation in the landscape of social reproduction, labor, and settlement.Footnote ⁵⁷ In The Life and Adventures of Christian Davies, for instance, gender exists at the nexus of labor, reproduction, and poor-relief. When a woman swears that Davies/Welch is the father of her child in hopes that this will secure her a steady maintenance, Davies decides not to dispute the charge: “I thought it better to defray the Charge, and keep the Child, which I did; but it died in a Month, and delivered me from that Expence, tho’ it left me the Reputation of being a Father, till my Sex was discovered.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Here, the child’s brief existence is narrated in terms of “Expence” on the one hand and another form of value on the other, as the reputation for fatherhood only helped Davies/Welch continue to pass.

When these texts are at their most legibly lesbian – that is, when they portray flirtation, courtship, and sexual contact in terms that come closest to figuring all involved as “women” – this is also necessarily reliant on the relation of the category of “woman” to population and settlement. For instance, an embedded captivity narrative in The Female Review stages a scene of same-sex “courtship” by refracting a crucial meaning of “female” as it coalesced in relation to settler colonialism. As Gina Martino argues, European colonial propaganda throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries repeatedly deployed stories of (usually undisguised) female violence and participation in warfare, a history that also found its way into the captivity narrative as a key genre for the valorization of the white colonial woman as both vulnerable and capable of heroic violence.Footnote ⁵⁹ Here, the word “female” first names the unnamed white captive that Sampson/Shurtliff meets: “They came up with a large company of Indians, who had been to Detroit, to draw blankets and military stores. But to her surprise, who should make one of the company, but a dejected young female!”Footnote ⁶⁰ Sampson/Shurtliff deploys their masculinity to stage a ruse of courtship to free her: “She requested to marry one of their girls. They haughtily refused; but concluded, for so much, she might have the white girl.”Footnote ⁶¹ Throughout the text, Sampson/Shurtliff’s masculinity is repeatedly identified with the violent work of colonial settlement and expansion. At the same time, by portraying the captive as Sampson/Shurtliff’s “unfortunate sister sufferer,” Mann here also identifies Sampson/Shurtliff with the genre of white femininity popularized by the captivity narrative.Footnote ⁶² The embedded captivity narrative thus relies on and enhances the spectacle of “same-sex” courtship.

As the transmasculinity narrative shifted its generic focus from the early-modern noble “woman warrior” of the romance tradition to increasingly working-class biography in the eighteenth century, these texts frequently intertwined the masculine-coded labor of sailing and soldiering with the ongoing feminine-coded labor of social reproduction, combining both in one person’s experience of life across genders, and thus further emphasizing all gender as a relation to labor, social reproduction, and a global, colonial distribution of both people and resources.Footnote ⁶³ Thus both queer and trans resonances of these texts exist not in spite of, but through their embeddedness in these relations.

Beyond Self-Determination?

In 2018, Alex Myers (author of Revolutionary, a historical novel about Sampson/Shurtliff) published an article in Slate that contemplated the relation of these eighteenth-century narratives to contemporary trans politics for a popular audience. The material contingencies of these narratives are, for Myers, uncomfortably resonant with contemporary dismissals of trans identities as insufficiently “real”: “These stories present living as a man as something that a woman must do out of financial or social necessity: Her desire to live as a man has nothing to do with identity or self-understanding.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: A Trans History, by contrast, conceptualizes the “female husband” as a capacious category whose salience for trans history can coexist with reasons for gender crossing that are not fully legible to contemporary norms of legal or medical gatekeeping. Yet, Manion nevertheless often prefers their female husbands to be motivated by a deeply felt interiority that cannot be reduced to (and thus is defined in opposition to) economic or social exigency. For example, in their account of the eighteenth-century English “female husband” James Howe, Manion writes that the story as told in the Gentleman’s Magazine – that the Howes used a coin toss to decide who would be the husband and who would be the wife – “must be read with skepticism,” not only because the narrative cannot be fully corroborated, but also because the story disturbs Manion’s sense of trans potentiality:

“Neutered” implies a link between masculinity and agency, especially the kind of willful self-possession that refuses to be made subject to the linked forces of chance and economic contingency so powerfully metaphorized by the coin toss. I concur that we have no evidence the coin toss really happened. But I don’t agree that this story and the playful contingency it embodies would, if it were true, deprive Howe of masculinity, desire, or a place in trans history. Indeed, the texts through which we access Howe’s story today largely refuse the presumption that the legibility of a “true,” deeply felt, or self-determined gender must be signaled by gender’s distinction from relations to labor, property, or social reproduction.Footnote ⁶⁶

The eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transmasculinity narrative both helps construct the white, male colonial subject of property and helps us understand that the very construction of that subject is more embedded in contingent material conditions than its ideal of self-possession would assert.Footnote ⁶⁷ Mann identifies Sampson/Shurtliff’s break with their assigned gender as emblematic of “liberty” as a patriotic ideal of both personal and national self-determination: “Though independent and free, custom in many respects, rules us with despotic sway. … But on the other hand, liberty gives us such ascendancy over old habit, that unless it bind us to some apparent and permanent good, its iron bands are subject to dissolution.”Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, these texts also do not always so cleanly figure such a distinction between coerced and chosen gender identifications. For instance, Talbot/Taylor is assigned female at birth, but then coerced into presenting as a man by a male guardian who exploits them both financially and sexually. In the same text, Talbot/Taylor also narrates a strong persistence in maintaining male clothing and social identity later in life, and is portrayed as asserting this identity as earned through service to the nation: “Having been used to a male dress in defence of my country, I thought I was sufficiently entitled to wear the same whenever I thought proper.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This narrative asserts Talbot/Taylor’s masculinity as deeply felt, self-asserted, and just as coercive in its origins as their initial assignment as female.

While these texts generally portray their protagonists’ labor of masculinity as spectacularly singular, some occasional instances in which transmasculinity relies on the labor of others reveal further gendered and racialized relations that make up the spectacularly “self-made” transmasculine individual. When Almira Paul falls ill in Demerara, their ability to command racial authority over their nurse is crucial to their ability to pass: “I was not without my apprehensions that I should now no longer be enabled to conceal my sex – but, fortunately for me, a woman of color was my nurse, to whom I took an opportunity to suggest, that laboring under a natural infirmity, my situation required that I should constantly wear a close garment, which it would be improper for her or any other person to divest me of.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, the earlier narrative of Hannah Snell/James Gray’s treatment of their own bullet wound sustained during the Siege of Pondicherry notes their reliance on the labor of women of color: “Confirmed in this Resolution, she communicated her Design to a black Woman, who attended upon her, and could get at the Surgeon’s Medicines, and desired her Assistance.”Footnote ⁷¹

As Kadji Amin reminds us, the search for reclaimable trans “origin figures” can run the risk of imposing a teleology that ends with the most legible forms of contemporary trans identity, while eliding “the inseparability of gender variance from complex conditions including political economy, religion, colonialism, and state formation.”Footnote ⁷² The transmasculinity narrative is, in many ways, one defined centrally by gender self-determination. At the same time, these texts reveal the embeddedness of “self-determination” in colonial regimes of property while also frequently undercutting the very notion of self-determination they seem to herald. What appears to us as reaching for the language of self-determination is simultaneously insistently embedded in the material exigencies of labor, subsistence, social reproduction, and the biopolitical movability of populations across empire. Recent scholarship on eighteenth-century and early American trans history has, increasingly, rightly insisted that historians revise their cataloging practices and pronoun usages in ways that reflect evidence for historical actors’ gender self-determination rather than (for instance) imposing pronouns that align with a gender assignment that a historical person was known to have rejected or evaded.Footnote ⁷³ However, the uneasy place of self-determination in these transmasculinity narratives and their readerly afterlives – as an ideal that is fantasized to transcend material exigency and yet depends on the socio-material worlds built as “gender” for racial capitalism and settler colonialism – may push us to find terms and concepts other than “self-determination” as the primary framing for our ethical engagements with queer/trans histories in the present.Footnote ⁷⁴