Pamela L. Caughie

Bio

Pamela L. Caughie, Professor of English and gender studies at Loyola University Chicago, is a senior modernist scholar and theorist, former president of the Modernist Studies Association, and founding and co-director of Modernist Networks (www.modnets.org), a consortium of digital projects in modernist literature and culture. She is author of two books, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism and Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility, and over forty book chapters and articles. She is editor or co-editor of four works, including Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Disciplining Modernism, Virginia Woolf Writing the World, and Woolf Online, a digital archive of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (www.woolfonline.com). With Sabine Meyer, she is currently co-editing a comparative scholarly print and digital edition of Man into Woman (1933), the life narrative of Lili Elbe.

Contributions

From Work to Tech: Digital Archives and Queer Narratives

Peer Reviewed
Print Plus Exclusive
Contemporary genealogies of transgender are now returning to the scene of the modern, for the modernist era witnessed tremendous change in concepts of sexual and gender identity. In turn, contemporary modernist scholarship is returning to fin de siècle sexology. Michael Levenson in Modernism (2011) makes the case for the sexologist’s case study as an experimental modernist narrative form. [2] In 2016 Benjamin Kahan published Heinrich Kaan’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality and edited a cluster for Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform on “sexual modernity.” [3] And currently we, with Nikolaus Wasmoen, are co-editing the first comparative scholarly edition of Man into Woman (1933), the life narrative of “Lili Elbe,” who, as Einar Wegener, was one of the first people to undergo gender confirmation surgery in 1930. [4] Thinking about the display of this text in both print and digital versions raises an interesting set of connections between transgender theory and a theory of the literary work as an historical artifact.

Tags:

trans identity queerness