“Gender Unconformities: Becoming-with the Environment” intervenes in scholarly debates on how and if pre-twentieth century trans historiography is not only methodologically possible, but necessary. There are assumptions that trans historiography reifies a kind of pathologizing that requires endurance and continuity. Such a logic of endurance makes life a prerequisite: in order to endure long-term, one is presupposed to survive long enough to endure. Such metrics continue to efface the experiences of gender variant existences and the potential privileges of inclusion whiteness has experienced in accessing, speaking, and identifying as non-cisgender as a result of settler colonialism. The dissertation asks: what about a trans historiography interested in counterfactuals: the “what could have beens”? Gender unconformities, as a method of trans historiography, offers a potentially healing method by considering and archiving forms of trans*-embodiment that do not endure or do not endure in the Western identitarian sense over long periods of time but may only shore up in a brief moment or in a single novel, text, or poem. A gender unconformity registers and historicizes gender variant lives and representations prior to the emergence of the Western identitarian category of transgender in the twentieth century. An unconformity is a type of geologic contact—a boundary between rocks—that reflects a break, a trespass, or transgression in an otherwise continuous rock record. The very existence (however brief of an interval) of an unconformity asks us to resist reading environmental forms in modes of linear, chronological, and developmental endurance. The dissertation tends to temporary novelistic representations in which bodies not only do not conform to expected and known life trajectories, but readily, and however briefly, un-conform and deconstruct those expectations, suggesting fiction as sites of counterfactuals in which genders have performed or existed otherwise. Many of the characters the dissertation focuses on cannot be understood in the reductive terms of “man” and “woman.” This is because their physical engagements with the land alter their bodies through labor, activity, debility, illness, and death, and thus alter the meanings and connotations of their gendering. Rather than use currently accepted terms for nonbinary gendering, this project relies on gender unconformities, where the impacts of drainage, enclosure, extraction, and settlement on the environment recorded new contacts between body and matter, and thus, offer an innovative historical framework for conceptualizing the fluidity, plurality, porosity, fungibility, and plasticity of genders. Such representations of gender can be understood as a “becoming-with the environment” where the language of ecological discourses produces forms of embodiment that escape identitarian policing. The project traces the shift between minoritized humans’ encounters with the environments and the eventual cooptation of such a narrative modality by white settlers where becoming-with and all of its fungible plasticity, ends up providing socio-legal privileges rather than immediate correlations to death, debility, and precarity.
The dissertation relies on diverse genres of land improvement narratives and illustrations of taxonomic classifications: novels, maps, land surveys, public news and journal articles, paintings, drawings, and legal acts produced around the time of England’s 1801 Inclosure (Consolidation) Act. This historical legal transition produced the potential for and possibility of other bodily transitions even as it foreclosed recognition of certain kinds of gender expansiveness. Each chapter reads for instances of becoming-with in order to address the specific types of gender unconformities such intimacies produce. Each chapter tends to historically specific environments and species: Northern England wetlands, the South African Transvaal desert and blue gum tree, Aotearoa (New Zealand) bush and ramarama (evergreen shrub), and Bengal’s sāl (Shorea robusta) forests and their direct effects, potentials, and possibilities on narrative form, including representations of embodiment, desire, gender, and sexuality.
