Oh how funny that you just re-read Justified Sinner! I could see how revisiting it with your particular expertise in the history would be an interesting time.
I hadn't heard of that Milne mystery novel, it sounds good.
There is some interesting gender/sexuality stuff. As with Hannah Snell, there's little suggestion anywhere that a woman passing herself off as a man might be seen as morally wrong in itself, but Defoe does go out of his way to reassure readers that Christian is exceptional and obviously most women could never do anything like this.
This part of your Life and Adventures... summary struck me. I read a post on tumblr last month coming from the perspective of asking 'where is transmasculinity in history,' and it also discussed the treatment of 'crossdressing women' as a sex offense or equivalent to prostitution. (And had interesting speculation on the difficulty of finding accounts of possibly-transmasculine people who primarily had relationships with men.) Modern gender label challenges aside, it's neat to hear about this 18th century account of at least one person, and the justifications used for why it was okay in this case!
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I hadn't heard of that Milne mystery novel, it sounds good.
There is some interesting gender/sexuality stuff. As with Hannah Snell, there's little suggestion anywhere that a woman passing herself off as a man might be seen as morally wrong in itself, but Defoe does go out of his way to reassure readers that Christian is exceptional and obviously most women could never do anything like this.
This part of your Life and Adventures... summary struck me. I read a post on tumblr last month coming from the perspective of asking 'where is transmasculinity in history,' and it also discussed the treatment of 'crossdressing women' as a sex offense or equivalent to prostitution. (And had interesting speculation on the difficulty of finding accounts of possibly-transmasculine people who primarily had relationships with men.) Modern gender label challenges aside, it's neat to hear about this 18th century account of at least one person, and the justifications used for why it was okay in this case!