Histories of gender often ground their politics in the implied naturalness of the experience. Yet gender diversity was not only an undeniable reality for residents of North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was also a reality created in part by the labor politics of the time. This talk will focus on gender diversity that was engineered or imposed upon individuals, primarily enslaved individuals who were castrated as a form of punishment, putting the reality of these histories into conversation with scholarship in trans history that prioritizes willed, elected, or self-chosen forms of gender nonconformity.
Greta LaFleur is an associate professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale University. LaFleur’s research and teaching focus on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer and trans studies. Her first book, "The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), reveals how eighteenth-century race science contributed to emerging sciences of sex in the colonial Atlantic world.