“More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve

• Main Author: Desmond Huthwaite
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-08-01
• Series: Humanities
• Subjects: Clara Reeve; Female Gothic; trans; queer; gender; embodiment
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/3/98

Clara Reeve’s (1729–1807) Gothic novel <i>The Old English Baron</i> is a node for contemplating two discursive exclusions. The novel, due to its own ambiguous status as a gendered “body”, has proven a difficult text for discourse on the Female Gothic to recognise. Subjected to a temperamental dialectic of reclamation and disavowal, <i>The Old English Baron</i> can be made to speak to the (often) subordinate position of Transgender Studies within the field of Queer Studies, another relationship predicated on the partial exclusion of undesirable elements. I treat the unlikely transness of Reeve’s body <i>of</i> <i>text</i> as an invitation to attempt a trans reading of the bodies <i>within</i> <i>the text</i>. Parallel to this, I develop an attachment genealogy of Queer and Transgender Studies that reconsiders essentialism―the kind both practiced by Female Gothic studies and also central to the logic of Reeve’s plot―as a fantasy that helps us distinguish where a trans reading can depart from a queer one, suggesting that the latter is methodologically limited by its own bad feelings towards the former.