Tonal Crossings in Transgender Pasts

Don James McLaughlin’s paper “Tonal Crossings in Transgender Pasts” explores nineteenth-century texts that express ambivalence about the modes of transitioning they represent. Pursuing tone not as an invitation to read... [ view full abstract ]

Don James McLaughlin’s paper “Tonal Crossings in Transgender Pasts” explores nineteenth-century texts that express ambivalence about the modes of transitioning they represent. Pursuing tone not as an invitation to read for depth, but rather as a hybrid plane of expression to be studied on its own terms, the paper takes interest in texts that merge transphobic hesitation with a simultaneous surrender to gender variant cosmologies. Beginning with a “Comic Valentine” titled the “Would-Be Woman,” McLaughlin proposes that this card, designed to be sent as a parodic gesture on Valentine’s Day, may appear at first to deride the figure it represents. Yet, in taking a holiday that celebrates heterosexual coupledom for its occasion, such valentines also rebelled against the imperative to prioritize normative courtship by suffusing the holiday, instead, with a circulation of gender variant types. Thus, these valentines also revel in a transgressive imaginary, legible by their attitude of play, extravagance, and aloofness. To consider the value of equivocating imaginaries further, McLaughlin concludes by exploring the celebrity of the Ojibwe warrior Ozaawindib, who identified as Ayekwe: a term designating someone assigned male at birth, who later becomes female. As a figure who surfaces in missionary records and captivity narratives, Ozaawindib’s influence on white American conceptions of gender variance becomes manifest through complex, multi-tonal accounts. In these accounts, Ozaawindib and her interlocutors generate composite imaginaries that are neither purely Ojibwe, nor exclusively colonial, but both. By attending to such incongruities, McLaughlin argues that it becomes possible to discern the tones by which nineteenth-century Americans popularized, and thus made it possible to identify with and desire, non-European pluralities of gender embodiment.