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Podcast: New Books in Italian Studies
Episode: Rachel Mesch, "Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France" (Stanford UP, 2020)
Description: In Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press), Rachel Mesch reads the biographies and work of three writers who did not conform to the gender norms of the period. In different ways, Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912) lived and wrote gender stories that challenged prevailing notions of masculinity and femininity, claiming and writing identities that complicated existing binaries and conventions.All three of the writers Mesch examines pushed boundaries in their private and public ways of being and in their self-presentation. An archaeologist, Dieulafoy fought in the Franco-Prussian War and traveled to Per...