UC Irvine FlashPoints Title The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11z5g0mz ISBN 978081013 5550 Author Heaney, Emma Publication Date 2017-08-01 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The New Woman The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how liter- ature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/fl ashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi- tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit- erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit- erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor A complete list of titles begins on p. 346. The New Woman Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory Emma Heaney northwestern university press | evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2017. All rights reserved. Scrapbook image related to “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed” and The Ambisexual Art Dealer copyright © The Authors League Fund and St. Brides’ Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Heaney, Emma, author. Title: The new woman : literary modernism, queer theory, and the trans feminine allegory / Emma Heaney. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017. | Series: Flashpoints Identifi ers: LCCN 2017017682 | ISBN 9780810135536 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135543 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978081013 5550 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Transgender people in literature. | Gender identity in literature. | Male-to-female transsexuals. | Modernism (Literature) | Queer theory. Classifi cation: LCC PN56.G45 H43 2017 | DDC 809.9335267—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017682 Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Note on Usage xiii Preface xv Introduction 3 Part I: The Modernist Allegory of Trans Femininity 1. The Development of the Allegory of Trans Femininity: Sexology, Gay Rights, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Modernism 23 2. Blooming into a Female Everyman: Feeling like a Woman in Joyce’s Ulysses 67 3. The Flesh That Would Become Myth: Barnes’s Suffering Female Anatomy and the Trans Feminine Example 99 4. Ceased to Be Word and Became Flesh: Trans Feminine Life Writing and Genet’s Vernacular Modernism 153 Part II: Materialist Trans Feminism against Queer Theory 5. A Triumphant Plural: Post- Structuralism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine 203 6. Materialist Trans Feminism against Queer Theory 253 Notes 299 Works Cited 319 Index 333 Illustrations Figure 1. Page from Djuna Barnes’s personal scrapbook 106 Figure 2. Thelma Wood, circa 1932 147 Figure 3. Djuna Barnes, The Ambisexual Art Dealer 152 Figure 4. Article from the September 1973 issue of Moonshadow 254 Figure 5. List of trans liberation political organizations 262 Figure 6. Flyer promoting “Gay Women’s Free Spirit” 275 Acknowledgments One of the sorrows of writing a book over the course of a decade is having the knowledge slowly sediment in your body and mind that it takes a lot of resources to write a book. You mourn all the books left unwritten by people who did not have the time to write or the means to get their writing to you in your present. I would like to begin by ac- knowledging all those trans sisters and siblings in history whose names we don’t know, but whose existence made the world safer and more beautiful for all of us. Over the course of a decade, you marvel at those who were not supported by the structures of power (universities, news- papers, wealth) who nonetheless found a way to write, often because of other resources (friends, comrades, collectively produced newsletters and journals). I therefore would like to acknowledge all those who have capacitated each other in the production of trans feminist thought and political action. This book is the result of both kinds of support. It began life as a dissertation at the University of California, Irvine, under the direction of Dina Al- Kassim, who reset my intellectual coordinates when I was twenty- four years old by giving me Fanon, Genet, and Spivak among others. I was lucky to study with Jennifer Terry in the Women’s Studies Department, who, at every step, has been a source of intellectual en- gagement, support, and inspiration. I thank Annettee Schlicter, who gra- ciously joined my committee and saw what I was doing before anyone ix x ❘ Acknowledgments else did. Many thanks to Bindya Balinga and Arielle Read for all the daily ways they made my work at Irvine possible. My time of labor and study at Irvine was marked by the necessity to struggle for the future of both work and thought thanks to deep austerity in California and a political climate that sought to stamp out resistance to that austerity. This struggle was an education that formed my book and my life. I acknowledge Robert Wood, Rei Terada, Carla Osorio Veliz, Jordan Brocious, and everyone else whose terrain of strug- gle was the University of California in those years for teaching me. I thank the Sarah Pettit Fund at Yale University for supporting my year of fellowship there during which I fi rst conceived of this project. I particu- larly thank Jane Pettit and her sister Rebecca for sharing Sarah’s memory with me. Rachel Pepper was characteristically generous and kind to me during my year in New Haven, and I am so lucky to have her as a friend. Alternate versions of some of the work contained herein appeared in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, vol. 48, no. 1, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1– 2. I thank Isabel Howe and the Authors League Fund for permitting me to use images from Djuna Barnes’s papers. Many thanks to Tommi Avicolli Mecca for taking the time to scan and send me all the issues of Radical Queen and to all the people who wrote them in the fi rst place. At Northwestern University Press I thank Ed Dimendberg and Gianna Mosser for taking on the project and for being supportive and wonder- ful to work with throughout the process. I thank Jody Greene for advice and direction early on, and Nathan MacBrien for all his help turning the manuscript into a book. The years since I left Irvine have been marked, as they have been for so many in our sector, by a feeling of itinerancy with no end in sight. In such an environment, my students have been the reason to keep writing and thinking. Among many others I thank in particular Erica Banks, Jules Capone, Brianna Cox, Hannah Jocelyn, Anna Lyon, Theresa Stan- ley, and Shannell Thomas. Special thanks to Catherine Mros for work- ing as my research assistant and Angelina Eimannsberger for reading my entire manuscript and giving me a critical boost as I was fi nishing. I am grateful to Robin Nagle, Robert Dimit, and Ann Pellegrini for hiring me at New York University and to Ann in particular for her sup- port of my research while there. Thanks to Georgia Lowe, Joanna Byrne, and Nicole Pandolfo for all your help. Lori Cole and Patrick Vitale always popped into my offi ce to encourage and share. Theymade my time at New York University. Acknowledgments ❘ xi I feel very lucky to have been hired by Ian Marshall, Rosa Soto, and Maureen Martin in the English Department at William Paterson Univer- sity. I look forward to becoming a solid colleague and moving together to make the future of a great public university English department. My work with the Liberation School of Los Angeles has been an ef- fort to make a space for thought and struggle adjacent to the university. Skira Martinez is a woman who makes so many things possible in Los Angeles, and my love for her is deep. Carla Osorio Veliz has modeled what it is to reproduce feminist and anticolonial struggle and she, along with Patricia Ornelas- Moya, keep in my view that organizing is an ex- pression of love. Edxie Betts and Julia Wallace show me how to live revolutionary feminism, which is to say, how to work every day against the colonial and antiblack order that is sustained by patriarchy. Muffy Sundy and Yuisa Alegria- Gimeno remind me that the abolition of class society is the work of coming together to hash out our perspectives and practices. Love to all these rebels. In a society that distributes ease along the vectors of whiteness, wealth, ability, cisness, heterosexuality, and maleness my friends struggle to re- distribute ease and give each other life. They also provide me with most of the concepts through which I view my objects of study and the world.