Gentleman Jack: Revisiting Anne Lister

Lately, there’s been a lot of fanfare around Gentleman Jack, the HBO production that brings to life part of Anne Lister’s copious nineteenth-century diaries. I’m a little behind on the episodes, but I’ve seen the first two, and am looking forward to the rest. The show is smart, funny, with high production quality, and a certain tongue-in-cheek quality that gives it a fun campiness that is perfectly appropriate to the life story of one of British history’s queerest ladies.

Suranne Jones as Anne Lister (left) and Sophie Rundle as Ann Walker

              

  Yes, Anne Lister was a lesbian. And she wore an outfit that was rather masculine for the time period—though she did often wear skirts as well, in keeping with the time period and her class status. And I write about cross-dressing women in literature of the eighteenth century. So, needless to say, people keep telling me about Anne Lister and Gentleman Jack—and as I mentioned on Twitter: I am aware.

                I know that sounds snarky to say, but part of me bristles a bit at the idea that people who know my work would think that I had never heard of Lister. On the other hand, I understand that people who know my work are excited to finally have access to a pop culture artifact that relates to my research and, in general, their enthusiasm is awesome.

                Because the story of Anne Lister really is amazing and intriguing—and it changed much of the thinking about the history of sexuality. Sexuality has a history, and there are hundreds of scholars from many different disciplines, geographical areas, and time periods who are studying what sex meant in the past. My work on lesbian desire and female cross-dressing fits squarely into this area of study, as I’m interested in how women who dressed as men became an object of fascination for the reading public of the eighteenth century and, moreover, how such “butch” women appealed to “femme”/“straight” women in the past. Some women who wore men’s clothing did indeed actually live as men, and in studying them, we also trace the history of trans people; indeed, Lister’s gender nonconformity is an important aspect of who she (or he?) was.

                But going back to Anne Lister…Lister is an important figure because she changed the discussion around sexuality. Cultural historian Michel Foucault theorized that sexual orientation became a category of identification only with the rise of Sigmund Freud’s theories of sexuality and gender roles, as well as the writings of eminent sexologists of the late nineteenth century. Prior to the late nineteenth century (so the thinking goes), people did not think of themselves as straight, gay, bisexual, etc. Those terms did not exist or were not used in the same way as today, and, as such, many scholars in the past (and today) believe that those terms cannot be used effectively or accurately to discuss people in the past.

                The decoding of Lister’s secret diaries in the 1980s by Helena Whitbread changed all that. The juiciest, gossipy-est, and sexiest parts of Lister’s diary were written in a code invented by herself, and she details all her sexual exploits therein. Lister writes in her diary about being only attracted to women. Literary scholar Terry Castle discusses these segments of the diary as an important instance of a woman showing a sexual orientation that is self-aware and same-sex oriented. Castle’s arguments, along with those many others, challenged the Foucauldian ideas about when people began to have sexual identities in the modern sense. While my current research project on cross-dressing women doesn’t analyze Lister’s diaries, the scholarship that reacted to those diaries has informed my own scholarship in crucial ways.

                Lister’s story is definitely a complex one, and I’m not going to get into it here. Now that there is a splashy show about her, the articles about Lister have proliferated. Everyone from Marie Claire to The Atlantic wants to tell you about Lister, how the show portrays her, and in what ways the show is awesome and ground-breaking or how it“misses the mark” etc. From being a figure relegated to the shadows of history, a footnote, a topic of scholarly discussion, Lister is out in the open now (pun intended), and everyone has an opinion about her. Some discussions opening up are important—such as whether to Lister was, in fact, a lesbian, or whether she was a trans (straight) man. There is ample evidence in the diaries that Lister did not enjoy anything having to do with being feminine or womanly, she was a tomboy growing up, and as an adult she preferred men’s clothing. The line between butch lesbian and trans man is and probably shall remain blurred since we obviously can’t go back in time and ask Lister herself, but these discussions are important ones that should serve as reminders that LGBTQ identities have always existed—and will always exist. Other discussions about the show and its depiction are perhaps less interesting (The Atlantic wants to know why Lister is presented in such a positive light, for example, as if we need more sad queers on TV).

                In any case, if you do watch the show and enjoy it, I recommend you read a little more about Lister. Maybe check out Helena Whitbread’s amazing blog about decoding the diaries; or Jeanette Wintersen’s discussion of Lister; or buy the book for an amazing beach read this summer. Don’t let the show be your only source about this fascinating person. (Also: this isn’t the first time Lister’s story has been dramatized, though the Maxine Peak film is about a sadder time in Lister’s life--which I discuss in a previous blog post.)

                And, of course, if you want to know about the longer history of women who dressed in men’s clothing in Britain and British literature, make sure to keep an eye out for my book, Sapphic Crossings, when it comes out at the University of Virginia Press in the near-ish future.

Academic Publishing and Impostor Syndrome

Impostor syndrome is a by-now common phrase that describes the feeling that, despite previous professional training and achievements, a person does not deserve to have the job they have, or that they will never truly be as intrinsically good in their field as other, more successful-seeming persons. In a phrase, it’s the feeling that you “don’t belong.” Numerous articles have appeared in the last five years on the topic, from Forbes,to Psychology Today, to, of course, The Chronicle of Higher Education, many of which present strategies for overcoming this feeling.

For some of us, impostor syndrome can be paralyzing. In academia, it is particularly insidious because so many of us equate our internal, intrinsic worth with the ability to publish. In the field that pioneered the idea “publish or perish,” not getting published is equivalent to social, intellectual, and spiritual death. I feel like I know so many people—primarily women—who have put off sending out articles for fear of rejection, often based on a very real, very brutal previous rejections. It doesn’t help that the peer reviewing process is immensely flawed and its emphasis on anonymity means that foul-tempered reviewers often let loose biased, unfair, and hideously negative (and completely unwarranted) critiques that pass for a reader report.

My earliest experience with such a gut-wrenching reader report was with my first ever article I sent out to a journal. The article that was essentially a seminar paper written for an independent study. The professor was very encouraging, however; it was really her idea for me to try to get the paper published in the first place. So I did it; I sent in the article, and it went out to peer review. (At the time, I didn’t even know it was possible to get a “desk rejection,” i.e. a rejection from the editor without even having the article go to peer review.) When I received the reader reports (it was a rejection for publication), Reader A very calmly laid out all the missing scholarships and gaps in argumentation; Reader B launched a vicious attack on my writing, my lack of appropriate scholarship, and, worst of all, on the central claim of the article, saying, “this argument cannot be made” (essentially that was the message).

My first thought was, “OK, fine, I’m done; this was a stupid idea. It’s just a seminar paper; I’ll forget about it and work on other stuff.” But when I emailed the results of the reader reports to my professor, she immediately wrote back and asked to see the reports; she read them and very quickly got back to me that Reader B was a jerk, she probably knew who it was, and I shouldn’t mind him. Instead, she told me to take the suggestions from Reader A, revise, and send it to a different journal. I did just that; the second set of reader reports, however, were similarly divided. Reader A suggested a revise and resubmit; Reader B ripped me a new one. Again, it seemed that my argument wasn’t valid for Reader B. This time, however, the journal editors offered me a revise and resubmit; they told me to focus on Reader A’s suggestions, and after I revised, they would send it out again to Reader A and a new Reader B. This was an incredibly generous proposal; and, eventually, my article was published.

All this is to say, is that a lot depends on the support you have around you and the willingness of editors to go out on a limb. A subsequent article I worked on, about beards and cross-dressing, received: a desk rejection; a rejection after a vile one person peer review that was really a desk rejection masquerading as peer review; a revise and resubmit that ended in a rejection; and finally, a revise and resubmit that ended in publication. For me, the worst part of that process was the R&R that ended in rejection; based on my previous experiences with the first article I discussed, it seemed to me that the editors of this second article were simply unwilling or unable to keep working with me on refining the article. Luckily, eventually it found a home.

To keep going in the face of rejection is probably the number one way to get published. It’s difficult, though, and each rejection adds to the already awful feelings of being an impostor. However, two things helped me put this battle into perspective, both occurring not long after I received my doctoral degree in 2013. The first was in 2014 when, during a writing group meeting at a previous job, one of the more advanced tenure-track professors let slip that she had submitted her previous article to no less than eleven journals before it was published. Eleven! In comparison, my attempts with 2 or 3 journals before publication seemed like a huge success! And this was a person who was tenure-track while I, at the time, was a visiting instructor of composition, barely a year out of my PhD.

The second thing that really put my impostor syndrome into perspective was Devoney Looser’s article on the “shadow CV,” published in the Chronicle in 2015. In this article, she asks the question, “What would my vita look like if it recorded not just the successes of my professional life but also the many, many rejections?” I had never thought about someone like Devoney, badass roller derby player, author of several books and articles, winner of awards, all around nicest person ever, as getting rejected. But the truth of academic publishing is that everyone gets rejected. All the time. She notes that for every article published, there are probably, on average, 3 rejections she received. Reading that initially stunned me, but eventually it made me see that rejection is not the end to an article’s getting published; instead, it should be understood as only the beginning. In other words, successful people are simply those who do not give up.

None of this is to say, however, that impostor syndrome is easy to “get over,” to dislodge or deal with. Let me share a particularly insidious example. A very close person to me had a terrible experience with a dissertation committee member telling her, post-defense, in a private conversation, that she didn’t think her dissertation was very good and that she shouldn’t have passed her defense. This was not the chair of the committee, mind you; there was really no reason to say this to my friend except to belittle her and her achievement. She was rightfully stunned and hurt, and, worst of all, she believed this professor. This person fed into my friend’s impostor syndrome, encouraging it, watering it until it was a vine that paralyzed my friend for years. Every time she received a rejection from a journal afterwards, it felt like a confirmation of what that committee member had said to her. Finally, she stopped sending out her work altogether.

Not too long ago, though, this friend went back to a previous article that had been rejected and asked me to help her figure out how to publish it. It was a joy to read her work and, with some tweaking of the organization and finessing the language of the argument, it became a very strong piece of writing that was accepted by the first journal she sent it to: accept as is. When she shared the acceptance, we both cried. It was such an amazing moment to hear that she had an article accepted, that we cried from happiness….but I think we both cried a little too to think of all the years my friend had wasted thinking that her ideas were worthless and her writing unpublishable.

The people around us have the possibility to encourage our writing or to thwart it; we have the ability to encourage or thwart others. As instructors, we must be encouraging in the best possible way, helping our students grow as writers rather than shooting them down. Similarly, when I write a reader report, I think about how to encourage a struggling writer rather than trying to thwart them. I imagine that the writer is a peer whom I admire, rather than assuming he/she is a graduate student (and even that that attitude that bad writing is grad student writing suggests just how poorly,across the board, graduate students are treated by many in our field. We must do better!).

As writers, we need to surround ourselves with people who will give us useful criticism—criticism that gives credit where credit is due, but which also points out potential sites for expanding, strengthening, or improving our writing. Cultivating such people is an important part of the professionalization process, and, I guarantee you, people are more generous than you can imagine. Become part of a writing group; ask people to read your work; reconnect with past mentors; find new mentors at the conferences you attend; communicate ideas and network on Twitter; ask people to read your work and in exchange offer to read theirs; talk to journal editors at conferences. #writingcommunity is real, and procuring the support of other writers is the number one thing you can  actively do to help deal with impostor syndrome.

The other part of impostor syndrome is you and your own attitude to yourself. You must cultivate a no fucks given attitude towards the people who reject your writing, who thwart you, who tear you down, rather than helping you develop and blossom. It’s that old cliché: you have to believe in yourself. And when people tell you they admire your writing, you have to believe them. Let yourself believe them. Remember my colleague who sent her article to eleven different journals. Remember that even Eminent Scholars have impostor syndrome. Remember that negative peer reviews are a reflection of someone else’s ego or else lack of kindness, generosity, or self-esteem. And just keep writing.

Generosity starts at home. Do you want feedback on your writing? Send me a DM on Twitter @kleinula and let’s start a conversation.

#ASECSat50 Highlights

This year was my eight time at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and I think I can say confidently that it was one of my favorites. It was held in Denver from March 22-24, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt Downtown, just two blocks away from the 16^th Street Mall, with beautiful views of the Rockies from the 38^th floor reception rooms.

The View

For me, one of the highlights of the scholarly side of things was George Haggerty’s panel on “Queer Sites,” on Friday, March 23 at 11:30am. Presenting on the session were Caroline Gonda, Chris Roulston, Stephen Shapiro, and Fiona Brideoake—basically, a power session. One of the things I love most about ASECS is the fact that at any given moment, I can be in the same room with several people whose scholarship has been crucial to forming my own ideas. Caroline, Chris, and Fiona, as well as George, have published wonderful works on doing queer readings of eighteenth-century texts and persons, and they have influenced my projects immensely. It was a delight to hear the panelists discussing sites of queerness in the eighteenth century.

Caroline presented on Strawberry Hill and the damning ways in which Anne Damer’s presence there has been minimized or ghosted by current curators—as if Terry Castle’s “Apparitional Lesbian” had been published just yesterday rather than 25 years ago. Chris presented on Anne Lister and Eliza Raine and their time at a boarding school for girls in York, thinking about how the boarding school becomes a frame narrative for reading Lister’s later relationships with women. Stephen presented on gay male cruising grounds in Paris, especially the Tuileries, and how arrest reports for sodomy can tell us a lot about the class and power relations between wealthy men who solicited sex for money from lower-class men. Finally, Fiona told us all about A La Ronde, an ornamental cottage in Devon that I really really want to visit now. It was the home of two cousins, Jane and Mary Parminter, who resisted pressures to marry and eventually even created a spinster colony for impoverished unmarried women. Fascinating!

Other highlights from the conference included: meeting the witty and multi-talented Stephen Guy-Bray and hearing him recite Latin like a boss; hearing Rivka Swenson describe Cupid as a “bro god”; learning from Hannah Chaskin that Charlotte Lennox’s character in Euphemia moves her friend’s portrait from room to room so she’s never without her (queer much!?); being inspired by John Beynon to think about Aphra Behn’s History of the Nun as campy (does he know about our forthcoming issue from ABO journal on eighteenth-century camp??? I hope you all do!); listening to

Annual contribution to #ASECSshoes

Declan Kavanagh in a Q&A remind us that heterosexuality has a history—an inspiring idea and important to remember!; learning from John Tatter about Stowe and its gardens which I totally want to visit now; reading aloud part of “Mira’s Picture” for Erin Drew’s presentation on the non-feminine, anti-patriarchal female body; finding out from Leah Benedict that electricity is sexy by the end of the #c18; rethinking the linguistic aspects of disability/abnormality/deviancy in the eighteenth century with Rebecca Shapiro and Kevin Joel Berland; and hearing Declan’s talk on the poetics of impairment in libertine poetry.

Not to toot my own horn, but the session I was on, “Queer Swift,” was also pretty great. Jeremy Chow made us re-think Gulliver’s Travels through simian representation and queer lactation; Julia Ftacek reminded us that we cannot neglect our trans students when teaching embodied texts like “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” and Abby Coykendall pushed against “queer” Swift to ask “Is Gulliver straight?” (answer: not really!). I presented on queer abjections in Swift’s excremental poems—though for ISECS I’m thinking a touch of camp might be in order to round out this analysis.

Aside from the academic side of things, ASECS is great for alternative types of socialization, and Friday and Saturday night provided ample opportunities for that. Friday night took several of us to Charlie’s in Denver, a very campy gay dance club with a Western theme. Shirtless cowboys roamed the rooms with trays of Jell-o shots; seven foot tall drag queens stalked through the club, eventually performing for an avid crowd (damn those girls got some mad flexibility!); and the DJ mixed top 40 with country western and hip hop while we danced and danced. It was an epic night to enjoy queer kinship with several folks from the gay and lesbian caucus and their allies.

Saturday night was ASECS Karaoke at Voicebox Denver, organized by the superlative Gena Zuroski, the karaoke queen. Out of the 800 ASECS attendees, I would hazard a guess to say at least 100 of them showed up at one point or another to belt out tunes, socialize, and relax after three full days of conferencing. It’s hard to explain if you don’t like karaoke, but the mood was jubilant, relaxed, and very campy. When you’re singing karaoke, it doesn’t matter if you’re a grad student or a full professor: you’re there for the diva performance: everyone sings along with you because you’re all in it together.

I will stop there. I would say “see you next year,” but this year, I can say: “See you this summer!” ISECS Edinburgh, here we come!