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1 results

  • 9 - Trans-ing Transcendentalism

  • from Queer Literary Movements
  • Edited by Benjamin Kahan, Louisiana State University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
    Published online:
    17 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024, pp 173-191

  • Summary

    This essay revisits Emerson’s iconic transparent eyeball passage to rethink it as a moment of crossing over into queer embodiment and sensory expansion. If “trans” is “to move across” and “scandre” to climb, the point is not to rise above the physical world, but to move into it in such a way as to be in touch with its divine energies. To do so was to climb out of the enclosure and isolation of subjectivity and inhabit something much more capacious. Expanding the scope of Transcendentalism proper, the essay tracks this queer “I” into a number of other texts in which a similar experience or phenomenon of ecstasy opens onto novel social, sexual, and gender understandings. Margaret Fuller, Margaret Sweat, women trance writers, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Jacobs animate the “trans-” in Transcendentalism in their critical crossings and dynamic reassemblages of body and soul, self and other, and sex, gender, and race.