The New Woman: Literary Modernism Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory by Emma Heaney (review)

Emma Heaney's The New Woman is a rigorously intellectual text that isolates and hones the concept of the "trans feminine allegory," a figure who emerges out of the sexology, psychoanalysis, and feminism of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Heaney's central argument is that, through "the medical conceit of the woman trapped in a male body," twentieth-century sexologists reduced the plurality of trans feminine experiences into the "single entrapped figure that novelists and theorists then installed in fictional and theoretical narratives about gender, desire, and historical change" (5). The New Woman incorporates a straightforward parsing of trans feminine life-writing and literary modernism (Aldous Huxley's Farcical History of Richard Greenow, James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and several texts by Djuna Barnes, including Nightwood¹) alongside lucid historical analysis to demonstrate how the narrative of the "woman trapped in a man's body" came to be and came to stand in for a variety of trans feminine experiences (5).

Heaney bookends her robust text with the example of trans activist Janet Mock, whose 2014 television interview with Piers Morgan acts as a poignant reminder of the real-world implications and ramifications of the work at hand. In her preface, Heaney introduces the four assumptions that underlay Morgan's frustratingly ignorant interview: 1) that "[t]rans feminine existence is new," 2) that "[t]rans women must present their credentials before cis people to be assessed for authenticity," 3) that "[a]ll individual trans women feel exactly the same way about their bodies," and 4) that "[t]rans feminine experience is ultimately impossible to understand" (xvi, xvi, xvi, xvii). The book expertly debunks each of these assumptions, first by tracing the origins of the trans feminine allegory to sexology and literary modernism, then by demonstrating the plurality of trans femininity, and finally by proposing a methodology, materialist trans feminism, with which to analyze gender in literature and theory. Heaney returns to Mock in the book's final pages to discuss her memoir, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More,² using materialist trans feminism, which engages with the material conditions of living as a woman in a misogynist society.

Between these bookends, the study is composed of two divergent sections. Part I focuses on the early twentieth century and the conditions through which "transatlantic Modernism … concretized the figural status of trans femininity at a moment when the feminist woman and the effeminate homosexual became emblems of the historical forces that provoked a profound reorganization of the understanding of [sexual categories]" (6), whereas part II confronts some of the seminal texts of queer theory, which Heaney argues "revived and reinforced the figural assumption of the trans feminine allegory that the Modernists innovated during the period in which trans life was medicalized" (6). There are points at which these two sections seem disjointed, as if from altogether different books, although each makes an important contribution to the scholarship on the medicalized trans feminine figure in literature. The book's final two chapters may very well become required reading for students of queer theory and would certainly not feel out of place in the curriculum of any university course with a focus on modernism, gender studies, or queer theory. In them, Heaney neatly dissects the fundamental texts of queer theory by such theorists as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Lee Edelman to reveal their blind spots when it comes to the trans feminine, a "theoretical impasse" dating back to the 1970s that either installs trans femininity "as a figure for the breakdown of sex" or ignores it altogether (205).³

It is Heaney's literary analysis, however, which will likely draw readers from the pool of scholars and admirers of literary modernism. Joyceans will find Heaney's study of Ulysses refreshingly inventive, eschewing long-held traditions in...