Jonathan Swift and the Transgender Classroom

Abstract

AbstractEighteenth‐century studies has seen a flourishing of queer scholarship aimed at recovering the non‐normative sexualities of eighteenth‐century people and the contexts in which they existed. This article calls for an extension of this scholarship into issues of gender, citing both the existence of transgender students in eighteenth‐century classrooms and the potential existence of transgender identities, aesthetics and materials in the period itself. It ends with a model transgender reading of Jonathan Swift’s ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ as a demonstration of trans scholarship in the field.