1. A Soldier Is Born
2. Unearthing Jane
3. Excavating the Self
4. Fictional Truths
5. Loving Marcel
6. "May He or She Rest in Peace!"
7. Becoming Rachilde
8. Born of Scandal
9. A Symbol of Her Mind
10. Freedom through Imagination
11. Death by Marriage
12. Why She Was Not a Feminist
13. Becoming Marc
14. Montifaud on Trial
15. Clothing Stories
16. Love Stories
17. The Right to Difference
18. Conclusion
Rachel Mesch is Professor of French and English at Yeshiva University. She is the author of Having it All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women's Magazines Invented the Modern Woman (Stanford, 2013) and The Hysteric's Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (2006).
"Before Trans is an exceedingly well-written, layered, and
compelling account of three overlapping gender-variant biographies.
These individuals' stories have never been told together, and
Rachel Mesch's beautiful braiding of their lives and loves, their
desires and disappointments, offers a fresh and original take on
trans history."—Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of
Failure
"This fascinating exploration of three remarkable lives explores a
wide range of gender outlaw behavior long before the term was
invented. Consistently provocative, deeply researched, and amply
illustrated, this book will challenge us to think more clearly
about what gender nonconformity meant and did 'before
trans.'"—Margaret Waller, author of The Male Malady
"Original, impeccably researched, and well written, Before Trans
represents a vital contribution to humanities scholarship, French
studies, and gender and sexuality studies. This thoughtful and
informed work deftly demonstrates how much the past has to teach us
about what we think of as ultra-contemporary issues."—Rhonda
Garelick, author of Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of
History
"Through deeply personal stories of complex individuals, Rachel
Mesch gives us a much-needed history of transgender 'before' our
modern definitions and categories of gender identity. Joining an
exciting new wave of scholarship on gender non-conforming
historical figures, Before Trans pushes feminist history beyond the
binary, showing how we can better locate and understand past trans
practices."—Leah DeVun, author of The Shape of Sex
"Before Trans is lucid, compelling, and a must-read for specialists
in trans history as well as gender history more broadly. Using
modern trans frameworks to understand the past, Rachel Mesch gives
us much to contemplate in her analysis of gender identity's complex
history."—Emily Skidmore, author of True Sex: The Lives of Trans
Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
"Mesch is careful not to make her subjects too representative of
modern ideas about gender roles, and delivers multifaceted
portraits of complex individuals, rather than caricatures in
service of buzzwords and slogans. This sensitive triple biography
will appeal to scholarly readers interested in the origins of
trans, queer, and feminist perspectives."—Publishers Weekly
"Using queer theory in practice, [this] immensely readable book
provides excellently researched biographies strung together to show
complex worlds where gender norms mattered, but could be
transgressed."—Louie Dean Valencia-García, EuropeNow
"A fascinating analysis of identity, women's rights, and literature
as a transformative tool....Mesch does such a masterful job of
relating to her readers, as well as her subjects, that we feel safe
in her hands."
—Mariko Hewer, Washington Independent Review of Books
"Rachel Mesch adroitly walks the methodological tightrope of
examining historical characters through the lens of transgender
analysis, yet accepting their gender originality. Her writing is
theoretically savvy without being academically ponderous. Mesch's
detailed and textured survey of these women and their writings does
full justice to their unique talent and complex psyches."—Vernon
Rosario, The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide
"Mesch asks a question that has often vexed historians of this era:
how are we supposed to categorise the seemingly endless number of
people who took divergent paths from those expected of the period?
Rather than place this within the familiar rhetoric of ambiguity,
deviance and performativity, Mesch turns to the lessons of trans
scholarship... In many ways, the greatest contribution ofBefore
Transis its promise of more; a taste of things to come."—Frankie
Dytor, Review 31
"As Mesch shows us, there is a prehistory of transgender, but there
is also a history of trans* narrative making through history.
Pushing against binarized gender categories through previous French
narratives is itself a historical narrative—another story to be
told through the evidence of queer and trans* ephemera."—Todd W.
Reeser, Canadian Journal of History
"Mesch's pathbreaking book, Before Trans, is a must-read for
experts and students of gender studies for years to come, opening
the door to more scholarship on gender non-conforming historical
figures."—Anne E. Linton, Nineteenth-Century French Studies
"Contrasting and complementary, Mesch's three literary biographies
form a remarkable and lasting contribution to the fields of
nineteenth-century French, trans, gender, and feminist studies. The
book frees its three protagonists from their previous feminist
avant la letter category to show how, each in their own way, these
three authors embodied, researched, archived, and narrated gender
creative lives."—Anna Kłosowska, H-France Forum
"Before Trans is a hugely significant book for a number of reasons.
It provides one of the first explorations of French history from a
trans perspective and shows how queer perspectives can be brought
to bear on the field. Its willingness to resist simply placing its
subjects into new boxes highlights the success of Mesch's project
to analyze and understand the possibilities for telling new gender
stories in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
France."—Andrew Israel Ross, H-France Forum
"Mesch's far-reaching biographical and historical study complements
previous work on Rachilde and fleshes out enlightening and
interesting information about the lives of the three women writers
Jane Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Marc de Montifaud, while emphasizing
their exploration of their own gender identities, and most
important for those of us in literary studies, the relation of
their writing to that exploration."—Dorothy Kelly, H-France Forum
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