A Mystery Still: Historical (Trans)Gender Variance & James “Miranda” Barry

This lecture focuses on the intense posthumous speculation about the reputedly female body of the high-raking nineteenth-century military surgeon James Barry (1789?-1865). The instabilities in the factual Barry’s self-construction and the sensational disclosures after his death underpin Victorian, twentieth century and contemporary representations of the re-imagined Barry’s slippery gender/sex identities. How has this inflected pronoun choice and visual depiction? Does the way Barry has been represented shift across time, so that he serves as both a boundary crosser and a boundary marker of gender/sex paradigms?

A lecture by Ann Heilmann

This event is also available to watch live online. To register, visit: “A Mystery Still”: Historical (Trans) Gender Variance and James “Miranda” Barry | Gresham College

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