Search results

AbstractThe early modern fairy is a long ignored transgender figure. This article presents a transhistoricist analysis of how a range of "transgender" concepts manifest in the early modern literary imagination—instabilities, transformations, ambiguities, or indeterminacies in sex and gender—through the representation of fairies and the supernatural. It focuses on Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest, Duessa in Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jocastus in Randolph's Amyntas. Breaking from the threatening fairies of the medieval tradition, early modern writers reshaped how fairies were conceptualized in popular imagination, which inform our ideas of the supernatural and gender instability to this day. While transgender approaches to the medieval period have recently come to prominence, transgender approaches to the early modern remain marginal. This article seeks to establish what early modern fairies offer transgender theory and what transgender theory can offer early modern historicism. Through transgender readings of fairies and supernatural figures, this article demonstrates how such figures provided a space in which early modern culture could fantastically conceptualize transgender concepts and identities.

Abstract
This essay offers an overview of trans studies in the United Kingdom in the current climate of transphobia in both academia and the public sphere. This report outlines how trans-exclusionary radical feminist scholars have co-opted the language of victimization and academic freedom following proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act in 2018. The production of ignorance about trans issues and trans studies is a deliberate project abetted by the UK media even on the left. In response, the authors organized an interdisciplinary trans symposium to affirm trans lives and trans studies for students, scholars, and the wider community. The authors reflect on the successes and failures of the event in light of their institution's past as the origin of eugenics founded by Frances Galton and the broader scope of the legacies of the British empire.