Eagan Dean

My research puts nineteenth century American literary history in conversation with trans studies. My current research project, titled Inventing American Gender, investigates how nineteenth century U.S. texts used ideas about gender’s capacity for transformation as a rhetorical tool to negotiate with racial and colonial power. Using fiction, essays, and archival records from U.S. history, I offer a deeper cultural history of transness before the twentieth-century invention of the “transsexual”. My work understands gender as a category embedded in systems of power and difference. Rather than attempting to define what gender is, I attend to what gender does in literature as a rhetorical tool. Inventing American Gender investigates the cultural processes through which nineteenth-century writers created and used ideas about gender. I analyse literary and archival texts to show how each text invented gender anew, whether through the imaginative world-building of fiction, the theoretical work of essays, or the material production of texts as objects, including their circulation, preservation, or loss. Nineteenth-century U.S. writers used a broad variety of imagined gender systems within their writing as elements of their creative rhetoric. Deployed in writing, gender as a signifier can be used to entrench power or to challenge it—to justify American colonial power as much as to imagine the conditions of Black women’s flourishing under Jim Crow—demonstrating its flexible and provisional nature.