“Manlike, but Different Sex”: Genealogies of Trans Femininity in Milton’s Paradise Lost

Abstract

This article examines how Paradise Lost serves as a source for trans studies from the field’s inception in the 1990s. Susan Stryker cites Adam’s fallen lament as a conclusion to her landmark essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Mountain of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” but she uses his speech without attending to the troublingly misogynistic direction in which it turns. Two decades later, Karen Barad’s “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings” reproduces large portions of Stryker’s essay while obscuring her Miltonic source material — as well as the distinction between the terms queer and trans. Following Stryker’s citation of Milton and Barad’s use of “My Words,” this article offers alternative genealogies of trans femininity in Paradise Lost, from Eve’s surgical birth to Adam’s prelapsarian pregnancy. I argue that the imposition of Eve’s labor pains and the denial of Adam’s feminization expose postlapsarian sex assignment as tragically cisgender. Moreover, the persistent masculinity of Milton’s angels renders them less resonant with trans femininity. Milton’s portrayals of sexual difference challenge the modern evangelical argument that transphobia is biblically sanctioned. It is Milton’s expansion of Genesis 2:23 in Paradise Lost that enables rather than restricts gender identities we would now call trans.