The first ever virtual annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is a wrap! Many of us are worn out and zoomed out but also, I think, excited and energized by hearing about the research going on in our field. This meeting was the largest of the last few decades, with 950 scholars registered. That's amazing! The conference has always been a boon to my research and development as a teacher-scholar, and I want to take a moment to reflect on why that is and one person in particular.
This year, the winner of the ASECS graduate student caucus Excellent in Mentorship Award was Dr. Kristina Straub of Carnegie Mellon University. I nominated Kristina, wrote a letter to the committee, and solicited other former and current graduate students of hers to submit letters as well. I was over the moon when I learned that she had been awarded this distinguished honor. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that if it weren't for Kristina, I probably wouldn't be where I am today--and certainly, Sapphic Crossings owes much to her mentorship. I met Kristina for the first time at my first ever ASECS in Vancouver in 2011. I was a graduate student just starting my dissertation, and I was on a roundtable co-chaired by herself and George Haggerty. I was thrilled to be in the room with so many people whose names were on the books and articles I'd been reading. It was with trepidation that I asked her to be the outside reader on my dissertation--even though there was absolutely no reason to be nervous! Kristina was and is one of the most generous and kindest people in our profession that I have ever known. Kristina was one of the first people to validate my research interests and work; she was generous with feedback and support, and she always made me feel like I had something to contribute. This was especially important for me given that my home institution was not strong in eighteenth-century literary studies (an understatement!). Beyond that, I never felt like she treated me "like a graduate student." Kristina helped me feel like I had something to contribute to this field and that it was important. I'll never forget the effect that her faith in me had on my confidence in my abilities. In addition to her kindness and support, Kristina is also an incredible scholar whose interests in gender non-conformity in the eighteenth century, gender crossing, and non-normative desires echoed my own. Having someone whose fount of knowledge in this specific area is so deep and broad was a boon for my dissertation writing. Once I was in a tenure track position, it was Kristina who most emphatically encouraged me to turn the dissertation into a book. ASECS has formed and shaped me as a scholar, not just because it helps me stay current in the field, but because it has allowed me to be mentored by such amazing people like Kristina. A good mentor doesn't give advice; a good mentor supports you and encourages you and helps you improve yourself. Eventually, I managed to find more mentors. Another person who supported me very early on was Kathleen Wilson, an eighteenth-century historian of empire at my home institution. I was lucky to find someone who did not mind crossing disciplinary boundaries and, in fact, I think we both benefitted from this crossing. Kathleen has been an enthusiastic supporter of my work who made me feel, from our very first meeting, that my work was valuable and worthwhile rather than amateurish and unevolved. It strikes me that the people who have impacted me in the most positive manner are those who never treated me "like a graduate student," and that phrase itself brings to mind how much I have internalized the idea that graduate students and junior scholars are expected to be "lesser" than more experienced scholars. This feeling of inadequacy that I struggled with for so long, which occasionally still rears its ugly head, has motivated me to try to do better by the graduate students I meet at ASECS now. As someone pointed out to me several years ago: they are our future colleagues. We can and should do better to make graduate students, early career researchers, junior faculty and contingent faculty feel welcome and worthwhile. I will always be inspired by the mentorship of people like Kristina who always, always treated me and my ideas as worthwhile. Thank you!
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This month I've started a "featured readers" series for Sapphic Crossings, featuring people who have purchased the book and plan to use it in their teaching, their research, or both! If you're interested in being a "featured reader," please let me know, as I'm always eager to hear about others' research on topics relating to female cross-dressing.
Dr. Fiona Ritchie is our second featured reader for March. Here is a little bit about her and how she'll be using Sapphic Crossings.
FYI She is standing in front of an artwork by Adamo Tiseo. Very cool! “I am a theatre historian with particular interests in gender and eighteenth-century performance and my work often explores the many ways in which actresses employed cross-dressing in their careers. I am looking forward to learning more from Dr Klein’s book about how actresses like Charlotte Charke and Peg Woffington fit into a broader history of women’s cross-dressing in the period. I am also excited to teach Sapphic Crossings in my graduate seminar at McGill University on eighteenth-century cross-dressing, which explores women who dressed as men (and men who dressed as women!) both on stage and off. The book will be required reading!” Thanks, Fiona! Don't forget you can purchase my book from the UVA Press website or from Amazon in either paperback or ebook format or request it for your library! UWO Today Press Release for Sapphic Crossings. Full Contact Nerd podcast interview. Book Talk on YouTube for Women's HERstory Month @ UWO. Sapphic Crossings Facebook page.
As I mentioned in the podcast interview, I was first introduced to the topic of female cross-dressing in eighteenth-century literature in a graduate seminar on the eighteenth-century novel. We also read works from popular print culture like The Female Husband by Henry Fielding. I was stunned and excited to see so much gender non-conformity in the past! I had to know more.
The image above is an illustration of the whipping of Mary/George Hamilton, aka the "Female Husband"--an image that I found while conducting research for my dissertation. The crazy thing is that the image is from 1813 by Isaac Cruikshank--while Hamilton's story appeared 60 years earlier! As I continued my research for the dissertation, I was really struck by how popular images are of female cross-dressers. This image and 8 others made it into my book, and I'm so grateful that I was able to include so many amazing images. This topic is really the gift that keeps on giving. I'll always be thankful that I pursued a topic I am truly passionate about, one that intrigues me, because, in the end, it really has been 10 years since I started my dissertation research! To learn more, listen to the podcast or check out my Women's History Event lecture, as recorded on YouTube. One of the ideas that I am playing with a bit in my book is the idea of "body logics." By that, I mean, how do gendered bodies make sense to us--what is the "logic" we use to identify gendered body parts? In today's world, more and more people, especially of younger generations, are identifying as gender nonbinary, gender fluid, genderqueer, or trans. And yet, we live in a world very much dedicated to the idea that there are two genders, and when we can't immediately identify the gender of a person, many of us feel frustrated, angry, or ashamed because we have been taught from a very young age that gender is an inalienable binary. Some people have even argued that the gender binary of male/female, masculine/feminine is a building block of society, and that to deny that is to destroy our reality. Because so much of the world is still so dedicated to this idea, I find it fascinating that the stories of female cross-dressers were so undecided on these many points. On the one hand, stories of female cross-dressers like The Female Soldier; or the Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (London, 1750) emphasized over and over again that without a beard, without a penis, and in the possession of breasts, Snell was constantly worried she would be discovered to be a woman on board a ship full of lustful men. On the other hand, when Snell is whipped shirtless, the narrator of her tale tells us that because her breasts were "drawn up" (her arms extended overhead), her breasts did not appear so large and therefore, combined with facing a wall, they were not recognized as female breasts. This is a fascinating moment. It suggests that there are female bodied people whose bodies do not always "read" as female. In the story of female soldier Christian Davies (The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, Commonly Call'd Mother Ross, London, 1741), a surgeon recognizes the "marks" of breastfeeding on Christian's breasts when she is wounded by a bullet--and her cover is blown. But Hannah Snell had also had a child before turning soldier (the baby unfortunately died in infancy, we are told). So why did no one notice these same "marks" on her breasts? Throughout Sapphic Crossings I look at such contradictions because they suggest quite potently that writers of the past had a very difficult time writing about gender as they showed that even supposedly gendered body parts like breasts are, in fact, not always recognizable as belonging to one gender or another. To me, this opens up fascinating opportunities for re-thinking gendered embodiment and our investments in gender binaries in our own time. What if, indeed, the "body logics" we rely on to recognize gender are merely fictions that fall apart under greater scrutiny?
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AuthorUla Lukszo Klein is the author of Sapphic Crossings, and this blog provides a sneak peek into the book, as well as related content. Archives
April 2021
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