Nonbinary Jane Austen
Chris Washington
Chris Washington theorizes how Jane Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Arguing that her writing works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether, he shows how she establishes a politics that ushers in a future built on plurality and possibility.
Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently from how we have classically understood her: rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, the author theorizes how Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Instead, Washington argues, Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel to write a disguised autofiction in which Austen imagines herself as transgender and works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether. In doing so, she establishes a politics that ushers in a future beyond the cisheteronormative binary, one built on plurality and possibility.
$10.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1758-6
$5.95 ebook ISBN 978-1-4529-7156-8
106 pages, 5 x 7, January 2025
Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.