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Gertrude Stein's Transmasculinity

By Chris Coffman

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£105.00

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About this book

Argues that Gertrude Stein’s gender can best be described as 'transmasculine’

This thoughtful and sophisticated book views Gertrude Stein’s life and writings through the lens of transgender theory. Reframing earlier scholarship that falsely assumes that Stein’s masculinity was a misogynist manifestation of self-hatred, Chris Coffman argues that her gender was transmasculine and affirms her masculinity as a vital force in her life and work.

This book uses Stein’s writings – and others’ literary and visual texts about her – to illuminate the ways her transmasculinity was formed through her relationship with her feminine partner, Alice B. Toklas, and through her masculine homosocial bonds with modernist figures such as Jane Heap, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Carl Van Vechten.

Key Features:
  • Reads Stein’s experimental writing through transgender theory
  • Approaches Gertrude Stein’s masculinity and relationship with Alice B. Toklas through transgender theory
  • Examines Stein’s masculine homosocial bonds with male modernists such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten
  • Offers new readings of materials from the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Library

Reviews

Gertrude Stein’s Masculinity is a distinctive contribution to modernist scholarship and to queer studies. Through the concept of 'transmasculinity', Coffman shows that Stein criticism has consistently missed something very important, something that changes how we conceive Stein’s identity, importance, and place among male modernist peers.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Introduction: Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity

  1. Seeing Stein’s Masculinity

  2. Reading Stein’s Genders: Multiple Identifications in the 1900s

  3. Reading Stein’s Genders: Transmasculine Signification in the 1910s and 1920s

  4. Visual Economies of Queer Desire in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

  5. Picasso’s Stein / Stein’s Picasso: Cubist Perspective / Masculine Homosociality

  6. ‘Torquere’: Stein’s and Hemingway’s Queer Relationality

  7. Stein, Van Vechten, and Modernism’s Queer Gaze

Coda: Gertrude Stein Icon

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Chris Coffman

Chris Coffman is Professor in the Department of English, and Affiliated Faculty, Women's and Gender Studies Program, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, US. She is the author of Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film (2006).