Nonbinary Jane Austen

Download or read book Nonbinary Jane Austen written by Chris Washington and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2025-01-07 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.