Debates on gender during and following the French Revolution manifested anxieties about female mobility. Scholarship frequently frames those anxieties as discursive attempts to secure the boundary between the gendered private and public spheres. This article explores the interrelationship between female mobility and deviant sexual desire in Dorothea Schlegel's 1801 Romantic novel Florentin and Benedikte Naubert's 1799 Sentimental novel Heerfort und Klärchen. Both novels explicitly link crossdressing, passing, mobility, and deviant sexual desire. Though successful passing often necessitates movement from the domestic to the public sphere, both nonmarital and male‐male sexual desire in the two novels emerge only in nested mobilities: mobile practices nested within the larger mobility that is both compelled by and compels crossdressing and passing. By establishing what is abnormal or deviant – female mobility, nonmarital sexual desire, and male‐male sexual desire – the novels assert what is normal – domestic heterosexual desire between spouses. Thus they contribute to, and maintain multiple facets of the same ideology: heteronormativity; female domesticity; and the primacy of marriage and the intimate sphere as the location for desire. At the same time, by restricting sexual deviance to nested mobilities, the novels open nonnested female mobilities as spaces of possibility that can challenge these ideological beliefs.
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