Patriotic fictions: Inventing American gender through 19th century literature

Conservative leaders often ask the public to long for a past in which “men were men,” but Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Eagan Dean offers a radical counterproposal: what if stable, clearly defined gender categories never existed? In a talk describing his ongoing book project, Inventing American Gender: Nineteenth Century Literary Gender and its Uses, Dean draws on a variety of American fiction, essays, and archival materials from 1797 to 1902 to argue that writers were crucial inventors of the era’s gender systems – and that the systems they created served specific political ends. His recent faculty research fellows talk centered two core figures of 19th century cultural production and their Civil War nursing memoirs: Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, in which depictions of gender fluidity helped solidify ideas of nation and race.

Whitman, best known for his grand democratic poetics, appears in his autobiographical reflection Specimen Days not as a bard of the nation but as its mother. Adopting the persona of a nurturing, maternal caregiver while tending to wounded soldiers, he kisses foreheads, holds hands, and soothes pain, saying of a solider, “I loved him much, always kiss'd him, and he did me.” Whitman’s embodiment of a nurturing femininity “made his otherwise questionably queer behavior legible as a patriotic service,” said Dean. This “androgynous patriotism,” as he termed it, was a way of offering care to both Union and Confederate soldiers to mend the nation’s psychic Civil War fracture. Yet this care was racially bound. While Whitman briefly notes visiting Black soldiers, his political imagination privileges reconciliation between white men. In doing so, Whitman’s gender nonconformity becomes legible – and portrayed as praiseworthy –through its yoking to white federalist nationalism.

In Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, we meet Tribulation Periwinkle, a gender nonconforming nurse who revels in her boyishness, eschews romantic scripts, and yearns to have been “a lord of creation instead of a lady.” Drawing on Alcott’s real experiences and letters, Dean argued that like Whitman’s femininity, Trib’s masculinity is not incidental – it is the mode through which she accesses patriotic belonging. Trib cares for wounded soldiers by blending motherly tenderness with masculine camaraderie, wielding even basic care objects like soap “manfully.” Yet her imagined solidarity, too, is racially partial. Despite moments of abolitionist performance, Trib’s affection does not extend fully to Black figures, who appear in the text as either props or spectral others.

To read these narratives through a trans studies lens, Dean argued, is to confront one of today’s most dangerous political myths: that gender diversity is a modern distortion of a once-stable truth. In contemporary legal and cultural arenas, transitioning between or across gender identities is seen by some as an aberration from the so-called tradition of stable, binary gender. Dean’s work exposes the ideological sleight of hand behind this maneuver. By showing that 19th-century literature was already a site of gender experimentation, and that authors like Whitman and Alcott portrayed fluid, care-driven gender roles as patriotic rather than subversive, Dean makes it clear that gender nonconformity cannot be claimed as ahistorical. Trans studies, in this context, becomes not only a method for reinterpreting the past, but a tool for defending the legitimacy and longevity of contemporary trans lives.

By reading these texts through the lenses of trans studies and Black feminist critique, Dean’s Inventing American Gender will urge scholars to rethink how gender is written, quite literally, into culture. In moments of national rupture, Whitman and Alcott position gender nonconformity to the American people as an expression of a white nationalist patriotism, whereas today, gender conformity has been positioned as a restoration of American culture to its righteous, “original,” moral state. Dean lays these contradictions bare, reminding us that authors don’t just describe the understandings of gender that were endemic to their eras, but create them for aims of their own.