Victorian Art after Trans Studies

The nineteenth century saw profound transformations in how being and embodiment were figured across British culture. Art and science were at the forefront of these changes. As new forms of subjectivity were being formulated, the relationship between the self and the body, and between the body and life itself, were being reconfigured in visual productions and scientific writings alike. These transformations were entangled with new, ambivalent, and profoundly modern ways of thinking about gender, sexuality, form, and the nature and limits of the human. In Victorian art, the body was opened up to forces and flows which constituted and exceeded it.

This panel invites papers which centre trans studies as a lens through which to explore these turbulent transformations in nineteenth-century art. What modes of embodiment, being, or becoming come into view when Victorian visual culture is approached via trans theory? What kinds of subjects and materials come to matter differently? What are the uses of transness—attuned to transition, indeterminacy, multiplicity, and bodily change—as a theoretical and historical framework?

We invite 20-minute papers exploring British art (broadly conceived) in the long nineteenth century through the lens of trans theory and/or from trans perspectives. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

The (un)making of the human; nonhuman bodies; monstrosity; animality
Ecology, metamorphosis, bodies and environments
Racialization of sex, gender, and embodiment
Coloniality of gender; imperialism and difference
Transness and disability; mutable, prosthetic, and anomalous bodies
Fairytales, folklore, myth, and transformation
Spirituality and immaterial bodies
Sexology and medical imaging

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Frankie Dytor, University of Exeter, f.dytor@exeter.ac.uk

Emma Merkling, University of Manchester, emma.merkling@manchester.ac.uk