Nineteenth-century Ambivalence and the Gendered Body: A Practice-based Study of Dr James Barry
About
This interdisciplinary project combines literature, biography, and creative writing, culminating in a critical and creative exploration of transgender pioneer Dr James Barry (1789-1865). Interrogating how portrayals of gender changed in the face of nineteenth-century colonialism, my work will lead to a significant re-evaluation of Dr Barry’s life, and encourage curiosity about the ethics and efficacy of representing queer histories.
James Barry, a British army surgeon assigned female at birth, has gained cultural significance in biography and fiction. Fictionalisations of Barry have sparked debate about queer identity, but few of these depictions engage with Barry’s role in colonialism. My project will use fiction to address the value of seeking ‘representation’ in history, recognising the structural power wielded by the individuals history remembers, and the ethics of how to do justice to marginalised figures whose stories are not archived.
As a hybrid critical-creative undertaking, this project will consist of a critical analysis and a novel. I will explore how transgressive gender roles reflect nineteenth-century cultural anxieties in key gothic texts. I will interrogate how gender and other social roles are constructed in colonial writing and deconstructed in postcolonial texts, and critically review responses to queer works of ‘biofiction’ (fiction using real people as its subject). Conducting a cross-disciplinary review of existing literature on Barry, I will interrogate it in light of these conclusions, while working from primary archival sources in The Wellcome Collection, The National Archives, and the Lewis Walpole Library.
Depicting Barry in two contrasting narratives; one mimicking conventions of the gothic fiction contemporary to their lifetime, and another informed by experimental and postcolonial literature, the resulting novel and critical accompaniment will argue that writing about individuals like Barry works more usefully to tell us about ourselves and our perception of others than historical reality.
