Reclaiming a Transgender History: The Intertextual Life of Charlotte Charke

Feminist historians and eighteenth-century scholars alike have employed strategic essentialisms of identity categories like the sapphic to reclaim the historical presence and agency of social groups whose histories have been erased (or obscured) under patriarchy. Methodologically, strategic essentialisms enable the speculative alignment of eighteenth-century figures with contemporary identity categories even though such categories may not have been constituted as such at the time. Works like Susan Lanser’s Sexuality of History exemplify the use of strategic essentialisms to retain a phenomenological position in relation to power structures without assimilating historical figures into contemporary identity constructs.1 Though work like Lanser’s exists for lesbian and gay identities, similar work has yet to focus on the intertextual experience of transgender embodiment, despite the fact that scholars have recently argued that the lack of a speculative transgender/transsexual history in the West has led to the problematic interpolation of so-called ‘third genders’ across the globe through a Western (largely white) lens.2 In this article, I seek to construct and employ a strategic essentialism of Western trans embodiment and experience to reconstitute the historical presence and agency of individuals whose unique experiences align in degrees to transgender identity today.3 I argue that the intertextual experience of Charlotte Charke with her multi-faceted identities and roles, her resistance to pseudo-histories, as well as her negotiation and generation of origin narratives and embodied borderlands, constitutes a phenomenology of intertextuality and serves as a viable starting place for the (re)construction of a lost, Western transgender history.