The genre at the center of this essay—the Anglophone transmasculinity narrative in the long eighteenth century—was a popular and ubiquitous genre for imagining gender transformation and queer relations to sex, desire, and embodiment. I argue that the transmasculine figure was a crucial one for imagining transatlantic biopolitics, often embodying aspects of transformability long associated specifically with white masculinity in a settler colony. Thus, the genre is arguably more representative for the history of whiteness than it is for the history of either queer or trans imaginative or embodied life in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. However, it offers a compelling case study of a genre that can seem spectacularly hyperlegible for contemporary identification. These texts show how sexuality and gender came to be narrative genres in a print/public sphere with privileged relations to intertwined origin stories of the nation, American literary history, and modern queer/trans identities—and a very useful case study in the limits of looking for queer/trans representation in the genres that seem most readily assimilable into a legible prehistory of “queer American literature.”

This historiographical chapter discusses how the rise of LGBTQ+ history has shifted understandings of how all gender and sexual identities are formed and contested. It begins with a discussion of the activist origins of the field of LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s, and then moves on to discuss the centrals debates that animated early scholarship in the 1980s. The chapter then moves to the rise of queer theory in the 1990s, and analyzes how that innovation reshaped the field by introducing concepts such as heteronormativity. The 1990s also witnessed the rise of scholarship on colonialism and sexuality, which in turn impacted the field of LGBTQ+ history, which up to that point had been very focused on the Global North. Thus, the third section of the chapter discusses how, since 2000, the field of LGBTQ+ history has increasingly been global in scope, with increased attention to political economies, transnational flows, and state formation. In conclusion, the chapter discusses the rise of trans histories, and how these histories have pushed LGBTQ+ historians to think about gender in new and innovative ways.