Emma Heaney

Bio

Emma Heaney is a scholar of comparative literature, feminist studies, and trans studies. Her first book is The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Her edited collection, Feminism Against Cisness, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Twitter: @riislover667

Contributions

Stare, Flaunt: Seeing Trans Femininity in Literary Modernism

Print Plus Exclusive

In a scene midway through Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, the little tomboy Bechdel sits with her father in a small-town Pennsylvania luncheonette when, together, they look (or rather he swivels to glower and she stares moon-eyed) at a bulldyke standing at the counter. “Is that what you want to look like?” her father hisses derisively across the laminate table, compelling his child to answer, falsely, “no” (fig. 1). This glimpse of a butch truck driver “sustained” the queer child...

Tags:

trans identity queerness