Nonbinary Jane Austen

by Chris Washington

A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently than we have classically understood 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.

114 pages, Paperback

Published January 7, 2025

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't usually make it all the way through books that use the kind of jargon this one does. I get annoyed that the author is obfuscating their ideas. It feels like they are unintentionally self-mocking.

But this collection of essays about gender in the work of Jane Austen was intentionally playful. The jargon was funny. I was particularly happy when I caught all the literary critical terms from reading biblical texts, like chiasmus and hapax legomenon. Also Greek terms like prothalamion. At some point I started to feel like the author had collected as many words from as many languages as they could and had them on notecards over the desk, ready to be checked off. When one of the key points of the book is that the misspellings in Austen's juvenilia can be read as significant critiques of the institution of marriage and the fixed nature of gender, I guess it's good to have some serious German, Latin, Greek and even Yiddish words behind you. ("Mishegoss.")

Though perhaps the critic is using all these difficult words to get us to accept and expect "constitutive cisheteronormativities." Or even, "cisheteropatriarchalness." Help. I don't know the linguistic term for smashing together a lot of morphemes in a row.

Anyway, by the end of my reading of this book, I began to find the linguistic play really playful and delightful rather than annoying. I might have been corrupted. It's probably because I love some of the Austen novels and stories that Washington plays with here as much as they do.

Ah. As far as the thesis of the book...well, why not?

[Jackie]

There might be some interesting ideas in here but it’s hard to tell when they’re buried under ten layers of word salad

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every day I’m increasingly grateful i didn’t go to grad school