Colonial Cacophony and Early Modern Trans Studies: Spenser with Julia Serano

Abstract

This essay reads Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) in conversation with Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl (2007). I examine the imperial objective that shapes dynastic destiny in The Faerie Queene, locating it within Spenser’s chronicles of British history and prophesies of British empire and Britomart’s rescue of Artegall from Radigund and restoration of male rule. What Spenser’s racial and colonial project shares with Serano’s theorization of transmisogyny is that both seek to transmute cacophony into ordered hierarchy, whether of innocence or injury. Putting a sixteenth-century Protestant colonial administrator and a twenty-first-century trans writer and activist into transhistorical conversation, I propose, yields new insights into the practices of early modern trans studies. How can we as scholars respond to a record of European violence while remaining cognizant that our own critical practices may inadvertently reproduce the colonial mindsets and racial erasures we consciously repudiate?