Book contents
- Decoding Anne Lister
- Decoding Anne Lister
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Caroline Gonda in Conversation with Helena Whitbread
- Part I ‘Nature was in an odd freak when she made me’: Lister, Sexuality, Gender and Natural History
- Part II ‘My spirit’s oil’: Lister Reading, Lister Writing
- Part III ‘Born at Halifax’: Lister’s Politics, Local and Global
- Part IV ‘Curious scenes’: Lister’s Travels
- Part V ‘I beg to be remembered’: Lister, Public History and Popular Culture
- Chapter 11 Labels, Plaques and Identity Categories: Finding the Words for Anne Lister
- Chapter 12 From Anne Lister to Gentleman Jack: Queer Temporality, Fandom and the Gains and Losses of Adaptation
- Chapter 13 Emma Donoghue in Conversation with Sally Wainwright
- Select Bibliography on Anne Lister
- Index
Chapter 12 - From Anne Lister to Gentleman Jack: Queer Temporality, Fandom and the Gains and Losses of Adaptation
from Part V - ‘I beg to be remembered’: Lister, Public History and Popular Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 June 2023
- Decoding Anne Lister
- Decoding Anne Lister
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Caroline Gonda in Conversation with Helena Whitbread
- Part I ‘Nature was in an odd freak when she made me’: Lister, Sexuality, Gender and Natural History
- Part II ‘My spirit’s oil’: Lister Reading, Lister Writing
- Part III ‘Born at Halifax’: Lister’s Politics, Local and Global
- Part IV ‘Curious scenes’: Lister’s Travels
- Part V ‘I beg to be remembered’: Lister, Public History and Popular Culture
- Chapter 11 Labels, Plaques and Identity Categories: Finding the Words for Anne Lister
- Chapter 12 From Anne Lister to Gentleman Jack: Queer Temporality, Fandom and the Gains and Losses of Adaptation
- Chapter 13 Emma Donoghue in Conversation with Sally Wainwright
- Select Bibliography on Anne Lister
- Index
Summary
Through a reading of the fanbase response to Sally Wainwright’s 2019 BBC/HBO adaptation of the Anne Lister diaries, Gentleman Jack, this chapter asks the following questions: what is at stake in bringing the diaries to the screen, and how does the process of adaptation queer time? In the case of Gentleman Jack, many fans will have experienced the adaptation as the original. With her glamorous androgynous wardrobe, her butch walk and her seductive presence, Suranne Jones’s Gentleman Jack not only rewrites history for a contemporary audience, but also queers our temporal relationship to the past. This chapter analyses how the fans’ intensive affective response to Gentleman Jack - variously described as a form of community building, of self-discovery, and of mourning and loss - merges the fictional and the original archive in productive ways. In this dialogue between the present and the past, the Lister archive continues to forge a queer trajectory that highlights the losses and gains of an occluded and rediscovered queer history. Wainwright’s refashioning of the Lister diaries for today’s television audience has in fact led us back to the ‘phenomenon’ that Lister was in her own time and to a new understanding of the importance of Lister for today.
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- Decoding Anne ListerFrom the Archives to ‘Gentleman Jack', pp. 240 - 261Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023