 | |
| Author | Jen Manion |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | History |
| Published | 2020 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| ISBN | 9781108652834 |
| Website | jenmanion |
Female Husbands: A Trans History is a history book by Jen Manion, a professor of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College, [1] published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. [2] The book won the Best Book prize from the British Association of Victorian Studies and was a finalist for the Lawrence W. Levine Award. [3]
Manion reviews United States and United Kingdom historical material from 1746 to 1910, including newspapers and court records, to recount the lives of more than a dozen people who were assigned female and interacted with society as men, including some who married women. [4] [5]
In the Los Angeles Review of Books , Samuel Clowes Huneke writes, "A self-described "lifelong LGBTQ rights advocate" and professor of history at Amherst College, Manion created not only a strikingly original portrait of individuals who, as [Manion] puts it, "transed" gender in the 18th and 19th centuries, but also an impassioned cri de coeur for trans rights." [6] In a review for The Guardian , Grace Lavery writes, "Attempts have been made to argue that "reclaiming" transgender ancestors is ahistorical. Female Husbands demands a rethink of this position." [7]
James Yukiko Mulder writes for Women's Review of Books, "Manion's skill and care as a narrator of this story is palpable throughout the book. In Female Husbands, these figures from the historical past are shown to be complex, often ingenious individuals who labored to maintain the stability of their various social and economic positions and proved resilient when their lives and bodies were placed under public scrutiny." [4] Eileen Gonzalez writes for Foreword Reviews, "Public reactions to outed female husbands were often hostile and mocking. Manion is sympathetic and respectful, according them the humanity they have long been denied." [8]
In The English Historical Review , Emily Rutherford writes, "Manion is sensitive to the part that female husbands played in shoring up white, imperial heteronormativity: showing how a respectable working-class identity was much less available to African-American female husbands, and how female husbands participated in a genocidal settler-colonial project that, among other things, eradicated Indigenous North American ways of understanding gender variance. As more scholars pursue research along these lines, their findings might frustrate our desires to find stories about gender and sexuality in the past that affirm our present-day identity categories and politics." [9] In a Journal of Victorian Culture review, Billie-Gina Thomason writes "Female Husbands demonstrates that gender nonconformity and 'transing gender' is not a new phenomenon and highlights how much more can and will be done to historicize trans lives." [10] Cay Wren writes for Manhattan Book Review, "The predominance of trans history has come from a place of asylum records and violent newspaper headlines. This inherited trauma is still being incrementally rewritten in the LGBTQ community today, and Manion's literary treatment of the historical figures found in the pages of this book I believe will serve as a crucial continuation of that healing." [11]
In a review for History Today , Catherine Baker writes, "When Manion refers to the book's subjects as 'they', it is not to cram them into a 21st-century non-binary identity, but to convey the boundlessness with which the 20th-century writer Leslie Feinberg wrote of gender: to force them into female categories they demonstrably rejected in life traduces their efforts, yet too many of the husbands moved between male and female gender expressions for 'he' to apply to them all. By holding 'the gender that people embraced, negotiated and became during their lives' as the closest historians can come to truth, Manion's writing is a beacon for representing gender variance in the past." [12] In the London Review of Books , Sharon Marcus writes, "Then as now, conservatives feared that the many would follow the few. In 1837, a religious conservative in Boston warned that what Manion calls 'transing' might 'become universal'. In the 1860s, US states and cities began to enact laws that made it a crime for women to dress as men and men as women." [13] In The Guardian , Gabrielle Bellot writes, "While Manion's book is only a narrow geographic snapshot of such figures, it underscores their prevalence in the past, as well as the still-radical notion that transgender people, like me, are worthy of love and respect." [14]
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Hannah Snell was a British woman who disguised herself as a man and became a soldier.
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Sexuality in transgender individuals encompasses all the issues of sexuality of other groups, including establishing a sexual identity, learning to deal with one's sexual needs, and finding a partner, but may be complicated by issues of gender dysphoria, side effects of surgery, physiological and emotional effects of hormone replacement therapy, psychological aspects of expressing sexuality after medical transition, or social aspects of expressing their gender.
The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male is a 1979 book about transgender people by American radical feminist author and activist Janice Raymond. The book is derived from Raymond's dissertation, which was produced under the supervision of the feminist theologian Mary Daly.
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Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, historian, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, and is currently on leave while holding an appointment as Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at Mills College. Stryker serves on the Advisory Council of METI and the Advisory Board of the Digital Transgender Archive. Stryker, who is a transgender woman, is the author of several books about LGBT history and culture. She is a leading scholar of transgender history.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, often referred to as Miss Major, is an American author, activist, and community organizer for transgender rights. She has participated in activism and community organizing for a range of causes, and served as the first executive director for the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project.
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Accounts of transgender people have been identified going back to ancient times in cultures worldwide. The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.
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Shon Faye is an English writer, editor, journalist, and presenter, known for her commentary on LGBTQ+, women's, and mental health issues. She hosts the podcast Call Me Mother and is the author of the 2021 book The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice. She was an editor-at-large at Dazed and has contributed features and comment journalism to The Guardian, The Independent, VICE, n+1, Attitude, Vogue, Verso and others.
Transgender literature is a collective term used to designate the literary production that addresses, has been written by or portrays people of diverse gender identity. Transgender literature has grown so rapidly in recent years that it is now the subject of a scholarly work published by a major academic press: The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature.
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Jen Manion is a social and cultural historian, author, and professor of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. Manion is the author of Female Husbands: A Trans History and Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America.
Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America is a history book by Jen Manion, a professor of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College, published in 2015 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book was awarded the 2016 Mary Kelley Book Prize by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
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