Abstract

In “The Queer Imaginary,” I employ trans and queer studies frameworks to assess figures who alter their gender expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French works of literature, opera, and theater. By examining acts of gender transition alongside works by prominent queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz, Lee Edelman, and Jack Halberstam, I consider creative gender expressions of the past as legitimate realizations of an internal felt sense of gender. The non-normative gender expressions of this project’s corpus reject the ubiquity of male and female as the sole categories of gendered identification and offer alternatives to the two-sex model, demonstrating the ways in which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France have always already been non-binary through analyses of queer utopia, futures, failures, and time. This project abandons traditional interpretations of operatic trouser role performance as deception or disguise in favor of an analysis that recognizes the queer possibility and gender ambiguity of these roles, reminiscent of the lost castrato voice. By considering well-known works by Beaumarchais, Mozart, Rossini, Balzac, Sand, Rachilde, and Offenbach, this project positions queerness and queer performance as central, rather than peripheral, to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French cultural life.

Committee Chair

Tili Boon Cuillé

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Romance Languages and Literature: French Language and Literature

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

8-28-2023

Language

English (en)

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Available for download on Monday, August 17, 2026

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