Introduction: Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity

Abstract

The Introduction provides an overview of Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity as well as a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between Stein’s writings and her gender. By using psychoanalysis to complicate historicist imperatives and engaging recent debates over queer temporalities and relationalities, the Introduction lays the groundwork for the book’s argument that Stein ultimately rejected early twentieth-century gender formations in favor of a flexible, feminist, and anti-identitarian mode of transsubjectivity inscribed in texts that cross genres. Pushing back against formalist and materialist critiques of biographical interpretation, the Introduction also makes the case for readings that trace visual artworks’ and her writings’ roles as nodal points for intersubjective desire. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the book’s seven chapters and coda: four chapters that identify signs of Stein’s transmasculinity in her writings and others’ representations of her; three that track her masculine homosocial bonds with Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten; and a coda that points to possibilities for examining the implications of Stein’s masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy.