This chapter takes its departure in the narrative function of gender secrets and reveals in nineteenth-century fiction. More precisely, it details the “transing as suspense-narrative,” a literary tradition in which the “gender reveal” (Seid 2014) is used as a narrative prop to create suspense. In these narratives, the reader is provided with several clues of mismatched sex and gender. Female characters are described as strong and aggressive, like the frightening nun of Brontë‘s Villette (1853); or with large hands, as Rochester’s role as fortune teller in her Jane Eyre (1847). Male characters, in contrast, are described as small and boyish, with high voices and soft hair, like “The Boy” of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893). The logic at play here is one in which gendered bodies are supposed to match a similarly gendered surface. As the body is considered “true” sex, all other signals are deemed disguise, and the reveal establishes the presumed essence of sex. The normatively gendered body becomes the key and final answer to any question of identity. These narratives demonstrate understandings of gender variance as deception (Bettcher 2007). They are precursors of several traditions of depicting gender variance in suspense literature, as well as of cisnormative understandings of trans. Tapping into understandings of binary, innate and natural sex, the transing as suspense-narrative demonstrates some of the logics at play in much cisnormative fiction. This chapter discusses these logics, and demonstrate nineteenth-century fiction as the foundation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century understandings of trans. 

This article presents the memoirs of Andreas Bruce, a Swedish man that was assigned female sex at birth and later re-assigned sex as a male hermaphrodite. His memoirs, written by the end of the nineteenth century, are unique. They exhibit a rare example of what life could be like for gender transgressors during the nineteenth century. According to the memoirs, Bruce's transition and legal gender recognition was the source of some attention, but once he had gained a certificate of hermaphroditism and a male first name, his masculinity seldom seems to have been contested. Bruce navigates between describing himself as an ordinary man and describing his life story as unique.

This article explores imaginings of transgender ageing, and more specifically visions of transfeminine ageing futures, through an analysis of the auto-fictional novel Q by Swedish author Fredrik Ekelund. The novel tells the story of Fredrik, who comes out as transvestite at the age of 60, and subsequently struggles to come to terms with and explore their transfeminine identity as Marisol. Overall, cultural representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer ageing are rare, and often tell tales of misery. As such, Q is a unique example of a complex and relatively positive narrative of transgender ageing. On the one hand, transgender ageing is portrayed as a potential escape from both time and growing old, a form of “rebirth”. On the other hand, failure emerges as a constant threat, including both the failure to perform age-appropriate femininity and failure in the sense of becoming stuck with self-loathing and shame. The protagonist’s struggles to age successfully become intimately connected with pride and standing up for oneself, struggles that are in turn bound to homonationalist discourses of Scandinavian progressiveness and LGBT exceptionalism. 

Using Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) as a backdrop, this article examines the symbol of slavery in Fredrika Bremer's novel The Neighbours (1837). In particular, the character Hagar (mirrored in Jane Eyre by Bertha Mason) is analysed. The Neighbours depict slavery both on a literal and a symbolic level; firstly, in the representation of colonial plantations and transatlantic slave trade and secondly as a symbol of white women's submission. The slave trade is described as fundamentally un-Swedish, and Swedes complicit in slave trade as corrupted by foreigners. The wrongs of oppression are doubled with the wrongs of being oppressed, and both owning and being slave are constructed as non-Swedish positions marked by race. Building on the slave as a symbol, submission appears as a counter image of white femininity. Being a proper woman equals not allowing oneself to be treated as a slave.

This article examines Fredrika Bremer’s novel The Neighbours (Grannarne, 1837), and in particular two scenes in which respectively the transatlantic slave trade and Islam are debated. Together, these two quarrels form a feminist, nationalist argument against slavery, using an image of a misogynistic Orient as backdrop. The Neighbours present an unusually explicit discussion about the transatlantic slave trade, while at the same time simultaneously acknowledging and trivializing it. The economic system of slavery is tied to the transatlantic slave trade in The Neighbours, as the reader learns that a man that has become rich from trade with West Indian colonies has also been kidnapping people and selling them into slavery. The contemporary failure to acknowledge the connection between colonial trade and the transatlantic slave trade is implicitly critiqued in the novel through presenting the reader with two versions of his past; one official, censored, version and one that is kept a secret.