Trans Studies in the long Nineteenth Century Americas 

Co-editors:

Jesse Alemán (University of New Mexico)

Ren Heintz (California State University, Los Angeles)

Bernadine Marie Hernández (University of New Mexico)

In this special issue, we are seeking papers that utilize trans analytical methodologies to examine the long nineteenth-century in the Americas.  In the history of the Americas, the long nineteenth century (1789 – 1914) is situated amidst a particularly ripe set of markers in relation to gender and sexuality. Arguably, it begins on the heels of the Sodomitical Sin period (1607-1740) and ends with the full force of sexology (1852) and its demarcation of gendered “inverts” and the invention of the “homosexual” (1892). The era spans a vital moment for thinking through the rise and proliferation of gendered and sexual terminology that pre-dates the advent of the vocabularies we have now: transgender, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, to say a few. The crux, however, is navigating the differences among the racist and colonial powers that named and mapped identities onto people of color, the ability to self-name one’s gender or sexual identity, and the potential lack of naming altogether in exchange for embodied practices and acts that moved about the world without demarcation. “In the historic outline of dominance,” as Hortense Spillers argues, “the respective subject-positions of ‘female’ and ‘male’ adhere to no symbolic integrity.” Amidst the layered colonialities of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese powers in the Americas, there is an array languages and terminologies vying to demarcate differences along gendered lines, at the same time as such powers attempted to consolidate competing forms of nation formation.  

In this issue, we ask: How can we better attend to trans expressions and embodiments during the long nineteenth century without subsuming them to queerness and sexuality? How can we make more room for gender expression in this time period without the overdetermination of gender being read as sexuality?  How does gender expression and trans embodiment shift the way we think about racial categories and expression? What are the particular power and biopolitical influences of colonialism and slavery upon the formation of gender? How do we attend to figures from the past who may have been problematic even in and through their trans expression?

The special issue draws from recent inroads in Trans studies that have worked to navigate the messy terrain of doing historical work around gender nonconformity before such gender defining terms existed, or if they did, their signals may have flashed differently. Scholarship such as C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, the edited volume Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, and the TSQ special issue “Trans*Historicities,” among others, work to get at the pressing feeling that work in Trans Studies has not adequately turned its attention to the period before the 1950s. Additionally, historical fields of inquiry from these earlier periods have not grappled with the question of trans and gender nonconformity as they exist separate from sexuality. This oversight is due in large part to an emphasis on positivist historiography which claims that we must “know” whether someone was trans, and in addition, that trans is almost always attached to identity. Following the work of the scholarship just mentioned, this special issue seeks to invite Trans studies methodologies that are not solely focused upon individual performativity. Instead, we call for analytical interventions that examine “transness” in the long nineteenth century that gains expression through “affective flows, structures of power, and burgeoning epistemologies of difference.” (LaFleur, Raskolinkov, and Kłosowska, 2). Such a shift untethers transness from identity and even knowability, which allows for a reading practice that considers how embodiments, dis/abilities, expressions, and affects from this period may offer conceptualizations of gender that are akin to our transness today. More importantly, however, this methodological move refocuses attention to the ways in which colonial power structures and biopolitics were coalescing during this period in and through the ideology of race, gender, sexuality, and ability. Because of this, we are invested in keeping with the historical moment to better understand the (trans)gendered formations of the period, rather than turning to contemporary re-imaginations of the period. 

We could imagine such a special issue to have a variety of papers engaging, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Gender expression and sexual expression in relation to and in resistance of colonization and slavery
• Archival encounters, epistemologies, erasures, and theories
• Gender, sex, indigeneity, and the coloniality of power 
• Sexology and the gendered lexicon of the nineteenth-century U.S.
• Work, labor, class, and modes of production as they concern embodiments and nation-state formation
• Translation, Transnationalism, and the Americas
• The limits and/or possibilities of Trans Studies in relation to historical periodization, racial formation, layered or competing colonialities, language, resistance, cultures of enslavement

Our aim in this special issue is to show that bringing the nineteenth-century Americas into critical conversation with Trans Studies helps us address some of the most pressing conversations in trans studies right now: namely, questions of the periodization of trans history, the politics of naming and gendered language, trans and its relationship to identity, as well as trans embodiment and racialization. Bringing trans studies into this earlier historical moment, we believe, pressures the relatively modern analytical limits of trans studies and opens up new opportunities for critical thought, especially in relation to the complexities of layered colonialities, the biopolitics of slavery, and the transnational intimacies therein. In short, trans studies of the nineteenth-century Americas has a lot to say. 

We welcome submissions to “Trans Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Americas” in the form of:

• Research articles (up to 5,000 words);
• Reviews (up to 2,000 words)—approval needed from editors before submission;
• Visual art (300dpi or greater);
• Syllabi, teaching materials, or a critical pedagogy article 

Send any questions about submissions to jman@unm.edu, berna18@unm.edu or lheintz@calstatela.edu

Please send complete submissions by January 10, 2025

To submit a manuscript, please visit https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-tsq.  Please note that TSQ, like other Duke University Press Journals, has moved to ScholarOne, replacing the prior Editorial Manager platform. If this is your first time using ScholarOne, please register first, then proceed with submitting your manuscript. If you have any difficulties with the process, contact the journal at tsqjournal at gmail.com. All manuscripts must be double-spaced, including quotations and endnotes, and blinded throughout. You must also submit an abstract, keywords, and biographical note at the time of initial submission. Please visit the editorial office's website for a detailed style guide.