New and Decolonial Approaches to Gender Nonconformity

Kit Heyam is a writer, a heritage practitioner and a trans awareness trainer specializing in higher education. Their academic work explores new, interdisciplinary approaches to the history of gender and sexuality, and they have taught at institutions including the University of Surrey, Queen Mary University of London, Northumbria University and King’s College London. They are the author of The Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697: A Literary Transformation of History (2020) and Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (2022), which was a nominee for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction and a History Today book of the year. Jonathan Ward is Lecturer in Race and Diversity Studies at King’s College London, UK. Jon is the founder of The Abolitionist Curriculum, an open-access resource which centres engagement with the multiplicities of Blackness, and has written multiple publications discussing Blackness, gender and nation within popular culture .

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Homeless at Home, Jon Ward and Kit HeyamChapter 1: Learning from Different Approaches to Gender Nonconformity, Jass Thethi, Rudy Loewe and Eva Cheuk-Yin LiChapter 2: Getting on with Life: Nonconformity, Recognition, and Assimilation in UK Trans Activism, 1970-2023, Rebecca Jane MorganChapter 3: Remembering Jennie Moore, Nic Aaron and Jeanie SinclairChapter 4: ‘It is a Thing One Knows Not How to Name’: Embodied and Material Vocabularies of Gender in Early Modern England, SL Grange and E.M. ParryChapter 5: ‘Creatures in a Woman’s Chemise’: Unsilencing Non-White Race and Non-cis Gender in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Nemo MartinChapter 6: In Defence of Doubt: Transgender History, Pedagogy, and the (Un)knowing Subject, Onni GustConclusion: Forging A Home, Kit Heyam and Jon WardBibliographyIndex

New and Decolonial Approaches to Gender Nonconformity explores gender nonconformity across time, metropole, and periphery while confronting the hostilities of institutional ‘homes’ and lived experiences as teachers and scholars. Amidst this turmoil of new conflicts and painful histories, this collection offers an anticolonial refuge in the former heart of empire.