A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist
Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently than we have classically understood her: rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, the author theorizes how Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Instead, Washington argues, Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel to write a disguised autofiction in which Austen imagines herself as transgender and works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether. In doing so, she establishes a politics that ushers in a future beyond the cisheteronormative binary, one built on plurality and possibility.
| ISBN: | 9781517917586 |
| Publication date: | 7th January 2025 |
| Author: | Chris Washington |
| Publisher: | University of Minnesota Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 106 pages |
| Series: | Forerunners |
| Genres: |
Literature: history and criticism |