Baker, William JohnMorgan. Ralph Werther / Jennie June: A Critical Trans History, 1870-1925. 2024. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
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This dissertation concerns the sexological theories and political arguments of texts by a little-known androgyne, female-impersonator, and author who was known as Ralph Werther and Jennie June. It argues that, in order to understand Werther’s significance and trans histories more broadly, the skepticism toward medical science and disability must be interrogated and reconceived in favor of more situated historicist practices. This intervention expands the historical record for Werther scholarship, reconceives trans historicist methodologies, and demonstrates the imbrications of disability and trans histories. The introduction reconstructs Werther’s sexology and its connections to their liberatory aims to theorize how anti-scientism obscures trans pasts and archives. It demonstrates that a critical, nonredemptive historicism affords more situated, accountable interpretive practices that register cultural and historical diversity in gender. The first chapter analyzes Werther’s taxonomical theories. It explicates the ways in which Werther’s language practices and their categories’ forms respond to a particular medico-scientific, social milieu, demonstrating their political and historical embeddedness. Pairing Werther’s writings with an array of psychologists’, sociologists’, and sexologists’ works, the second chapter distills how Werther’s politics of sex liberation hinge upon their understanding of sex abnormality as “sexual crippling.” Through this line of inquiry, the chapter illustrates how late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century conceptualizations of transness were often inseparable from disability, how trans and disability histories in some contexts are one and the same history. Werther’s articulation of sexual crippling, though, ties the liberation of sexual intermediates to racial, nationalist frameworks, which, invites scrutiny of the ways in which gender and sexual nonconformity could coordinate with dominant institutions. The third chapter maps the development and uses of two devices by which trans studies bolsters its institutionality and grounds the historicity of transness—what this project refers to as “the family narrative” and “the figural/literal binary.” It shows how these devices inscribe a particular form of transness as the grid of intelligibility for gender diversity and as a restrictive point of entry into trans inquiry. Drawing from the preceding chapters’ readings of Werther, this final chapter argues for a less overdetermined interpretive practice that more closely reads the languages and forms of gender variance.