The Challenge of Trans Theory

LGBT approaches to material from the anglophone long-eighteenth-century period have placed trans as not only the final letter but as the final thought in their collective scholarly investigations. Broadly, the work across the last two decades in the “queer eighteenth-century” has been dominated by critical allegiances to the “homo eighteenth-century.” This chapter explores the ways in which homo readings of the queer eighteenth century have overlooked trans possibilities. I examine, through a trans-aware lens, a poem by Charles Churchill that satirizes a castrato, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) which takes up female cross dressing as an issue that must be “resolved.”