Eighteenth-century cross-dressing: Ula Klein on her new book, Sapphic Crossings

Ula Klein tells us about her new book, Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. The book looks across time and across genre in its approach to the century’s fiction, thinking in wonderfully expansive ways about the crossovers between gender, status, class, age, misogyny and Empire. We hear about how this works at the level of individual body parts, from beards to breasts to body hair to prosthetics.

Asked about the meaning of literature, Ula tells us that it asks us about legibility, about how we know what we see when we see it in front of us.