ABL 116: Before Trans and Before Queer: new books from Rachel Mesch and Dustin Friedman

Rachel Mesch has recently published her new book, Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France, and Dustin Friedman has recently published Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. In this film, we bring the two of them together and ask what happens when we think about beforeness, transness and queerness across France and England in the nineteenth century.

As you’d expect, the conversation ranges across histories of gender, literature and queer and transgender people. But it also asks about what it is possible to say about such histories, and traces historical people ‘relating to and renegotiating the narratives’ and identities available to them. We hear about why scholars might want to break up with Michel Foucault, and how literature is ‘an aesthetically self-aware, empathy-generating kind of writing’.

‘One of the best reasons for writing a book’, Dustin says, ‘is hearing other people speak about it’, but we like to think that he also does a pretty good job of speaking about it, alongside Rachel and Andy!