C19 Conference, Cincinnati, OH

March 12-14, 2026

Cisness, like many forms of normativity, defines itself through rejecting what it constructs as the abnormal. There are also, however, many nineteenth century American stories of entangled figures whose genders arise from shared roots. This era is replete with gender-nonnormative and trans figures who develop their genders in relationship to more normative companions (Woolson’s Felipa and her tourists, Ellen Craft in disguise with her husband,) or enemies (Lillie Blake’s Frank Heywood against Judge Swinton), as well as communities whose gender norms emerge when they embrace a gender rebel (the March sisters and Jo, Hawkeye’s company and David Gamut). It seems as if transness and cisness are always subtending one another.

Drawing from new discourses about the co-constitutive nature of cisness and transness, especially Emma Heaney’s Feminism Against Cisness, we invite papers that consider normative and nonnormative genders in relation.

Can we look at C19 gender as a rhizome––as a network of people and communities whose gender expressions bloom because of their submerged entanglements? What relationships underlie/are underground to what look like individual expressions of gender? Particularly, how do these relationships develop between trans and non-trans people? How do trans and non-trans people collaboratively develop narratives and self-concepts of gender, including within and across racial dynamics of power?

What alliances emerge across cis and trans characters in C19 literature and history? What conditions––material, social, and figural––have allowed for trans life to persist? What can we learn from these stories as teachers and thinkers living in an environment that discourages solidarity with trans people?

Topics papers might address include:

• The roles of trans characters/episodes of gender nonconformity in the bildungsroman.
• The prevalence of minor trans characters and the significance and/or function of their minorness.
• Constructions of cisness/normativity that embrace rather than reject trans characters (and the potential/pitfalls of this sort of inclusion).
• How such relationships challenge a cis/trans distinction.
• White supremacy’s role in such distinctions.
• Clandestine networks of care forged across a seeming cis/trans binary.
• Interracial solidarity (and its failures) in constructing gender.
• Strange, unwieldy, or baffling means of describing both cis and transgender.
• Embodiment and lived experience as gender’s locus.
• The challenges of trans historiography in American literature.
• The role of artificiality (especially fiction) in constructing trans and non-trans genders alike.

Please submit an abstract of 200-300 words to Eagan Dean (eagan.dean@stanford.edu) and Will Younts (wyounts@vols.utk.edu) by August 10.