OBSCURITY AND GENDER RESISTANCE IN PATRICIA DUNCKER'SJAMES MIRANDA BARRY

Abstract

Since his death in 1865, military surgeon James Barry has alternately been classified as a cross-dressing woman or as an intersexed individual. Patricia Duncker's novel James Miranda Barry (1999) poses an important challenge to such readings, as it does not reveal any foundational truth about Barry's sex. Resting on obscurity rather than revelation, the text frustrates the desire to know the past in terms of gender binaries and stable sexual identity categories. Drawing on feminist and queer theorisations of the relation between gender and time, this essay demonstrates that Duncker's use of obscurity opens up alternative strategies of gender resistance.

Manifestação Neurológica Hemorrágica Em Paciente Jovem Pós Covid-19: Um Relato De Caso

“…Um notório exemplo de como a persistência e a luta feminina foi e é revolucionário, é o de Miranda, também conhecido como "Dr. James". Miranda conseguiu exercer a profissão de médica durante décadas, porém disfarçada de homem, tendo o disfarce revelado após vir a óbito (FUNKE, 2012).…”

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“…Dr James Miranda Barry (1795Barry ( -1865, also known as Margaret Ann Bulkley, was the first woman to graduate from the University of Edinburgh in 1812, an occurrence only because she pretended to be a man (Drife, 2002). Modern analysis postulates that Dr Barry's contributions to obstetrics and military medicine were the first made by a gender nonconforming individual (Duncker, 2016;Funke, 2012). It was not until 37 years after Dr Barry's graduation that the first openly identified woman graduated from medical school in the United States in 1849 (Weiner, 2020).…”

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“…He was appointed Inspector General of Hospitals and of the British Army. During the famous Battle of Waterloo, in 1815, he stood out for his military-medical activities [1][2][3] .…”