Login
“A Mystery Still”: Historical (Trans) Gender Variance and James “Miranda” Barry
Share
This lecture focuses on the intense posthumous speculation about the reputedly female body of the high-raking nineteenth-century military surgeon James Barry (1789?-1865). The instabilities in the factual Barry’s self-construction and the sensational disclosures after his death underpin Victorian, twentieth century and contemporary representations of the re-imagined Barry’s slippery gender/sex identities.
How has this inflected pronoun choice and visual depiction? Does the way Barry has been represented shift across time, so that he serves as both a boundary crosser and a boundary marker of gender/sex paradigms?
This event was on Tue, 10 Nov 2026
Support Gresham
Gresham College has offered an outstanding education to the public free of charge for over 400 years. Today, Gresham College plays an important role in fostering a love of learning and a greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Your donation will help to widen our reach and to broaden our audience, allowing more people to benefit from a high-quality education from some of the brightest minds.
