Nonbinary Jane Austen

By Chris Washington

A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently than we have classically understood her: rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, the author theorizes how Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Instead, Washington argues, Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel to write a disguised autofiction in which Austen imagines herself as transgender and works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether. In doing so, she establishes a politics that ushers in a future beyond the cisheteronormative binary, one built on plurality and possibility.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1517917581
• ISBN13: 9781517917586
• Release Date: January 2025
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 106 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 7.0"