A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently than 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.

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.