Sex and “Unsex”: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America

Abstract

This article argues that residents of late eighteenth-century North America had access to a wide vocabulary for describing and experiencing variation in sexual behavior and self-presentation. Building on work in eighteenth-century science studies, this article reminds us that gender, a term that was used during the eighteenth century to describe groups of either sex, was increasingly understood as a way of characterizing men and women along specific behavioral or taxonomic lines. The article makes three claims: first, that the enormous body of scholarship on the relationality and contingency of eighteenth-century gender has not yet coalesced into an overarching narrative within eighteenth-century studies that reflects this understanding of the instability of gender during this period; second, that to center a historical narrative of the instability of eighteenth-century gender in our scholarship and teaching, we must center studies of gender that are theorized intersectionally (the history of gender in Caribbean colonies, rather than metropolitan spaces; the history of gender in working-class communities, rather than ruling-class communities; and so on) because this scholarship takes the relationality of gender as fundamental; and finally, that theorizing transhistorical “similarity” (as distinct from continuity) bears important potential as a framework for imagining a historically rigorous relationship between the politics of gender in the eighteenth century and the politics of gender today.

Eighteenth‐century queer studies, revisited

“…In the last two iterations of this omnibus review, Binhammer (2010) and Roulston (2013), magnified singular trends that have attracted their attention as scholars of 18th‐century queer studies. In their invitational appeal, Roulston's overview of historicizing gender and sexuality in the 18th century has experienced continued verve; the same can be said for the lesbian and sapphic representations that Binhammer articulates (Brideoake, 2017; Haggerty, 2018; Herbert, 2019; Hunt, 2019; Klein, 2021; LaFleur, 2014; Lanser, 2014; Peakman, 2016; Traub, 2015). This review assumes a different tact.…”