1. A Room of No One’s Own

Well, at the outset, I want to say that we have never understood Jane Austen, unlike Emma’s Mr. Woodhouse, who has. For that matter, we’ve misunderstood Mr. Woodhouse too. We have always read Mr. Woodhouse as a hypochondriac whose paranoid pronouncements about salubrious measures and means renders him, in our eyes, a crystalline comedic example of one of Austen’s characters who is so obtusely blinded by his own egoist obsessions that he warrants nothing but easy dismissal from our serious attention and scrutiny. He sits at home and frets, fawns, finagles, disputes, and haggles with his daughter Emma, Mr. Knightley, and the others over fantastical imaginary future contumelies and inconveniences so minor as to be, as Austen intends, laughable, and as such laughably shrugged off by us as we focus, instead, on the pirouettes of Emma’s own more consequential misunderstandings about the very marriage plot she does not see enclosing her with every one of her own wrongly uttered (mis)interpretations. Of course, reducing Mr. Woodhouse to this worrywart comedian who does not get his own joke—or that he is a joke, a punch line for Austen—also performs another stage trick, with the punch line acting as a red herring that disguises, voilà, the magician as comedian. In fact, this trick is proof that Mr. Woodhouse serves a far more vital role in the novel than merely being a lachrymose, fussy old bachelor; concealed in this comedic legerdemain, he actually hands us one of the long-lost—because so thoroughly misidentified—keys to close reading the strange disjunction between Austen and her novels that D. A. Miller began to unravel right before our very eyes: that “the realism of her works allows no one like Jane Austen to appear in them.”1 This is not to suggest, though, that Mr. Woodhouse is some mimetic Mnemosyne for Austen herself; that would be too much, a move from the pleasurable unimaginables of the magical to the unlikely and even, shall we say, moronic. After all, who can take anything the poor, to-be-pitied, invalided-in-his-own-mind Mr. Woodhouse says seriously, given all the trouble Austen takes to position him so? Who would ever, that is to say, in a novel about the marriage plot, take seriously what he clings to above all else, beyond even his fears of unlikely and nigh impossible maladies and perditions—namely that Emma (or anyone, for that matter) should ever not do what Austen’s novels appears to urge, get married? It strains credulity that Austen would disguise herself in this manner in order to so violently and gleefully comment on—reject, in fact—the apparent thesis of the marriage plot successfully come to a close that organizes and winds up the majority of her fictions.

Or does it?

I want to suggest that we are exactly meant to see through Mr. Woodhouse, the hapless comedian, to Mr. Woodhouse, armchair philosopher-prestidigitator, whose critique of marriage it seems the novel itself sides with. If this sounds like Mr. Woodhouse’s favorite dish, thin gruel, or that we find ourselves in a filipendulous position, then consider this. After all, in a novel that takes its leisurely time to ever unite its principles in happy unison, it is surely significant that a novel also so suspiciously alive to the probable failure of these unions for much of its running time should resolve as it does: by perverting Emma’s and Mr. Knightley’s conjugal bliss by having them reside not as a couple at Donwell Abbey, but at Hartfield . . . with Mr. Woodhouse! This scrambles history—at least in the sense that many widowed mothers would relocate to their sons-in-law’s houses to live if monetary or medical matters dictated, but rarely fathers and certainly, absolutely, not would the son-in-law in these social circles decamp from his estate to inhabit other than one’s own paterfamilial rooms. That Emma and Knightley begin the novel divided, a situation that perfectly pleases Mr. Woodhouse, only for them to then end up conjugated and not divided but rather united with Mr. Woodhouse, would seem to give him victorious laurels aplenty to applaud the fulfillment of his own clever sleight of hand trick. If the original meaning of comedy is that all comes round right again, then the way this comedy achieves closure would seem to vindicate him. What looks like Mr. Woodhouse’s hapless silliness in the beginning ends in unexpected, deadly earnest, neither tragedy nor farce.

They are married—oh, the horror!—but it is not too much to say that they are—as this catastrophe, this turning about, turns out—married, as well, to Mr. Woodhouse! Emma is thoroughly aware that Mr. Knightley will be giving over the role of patriarch and master signaled by his voluntary loss of time, person, and residence: “he must be sacrificing a great deal of independence of hours and habits; that in living constantly with her father, and in no house of his own, there would be much, very much, to be borne with.”2 In fact, this solution to their worries over Mr. Woodhouse’s woes finds its earliest vent in the novel’s opening pages during a discussion of the necessities and evils of the binaristic state of marriage. “At any rate, it must be better to have only one to please, than two,” Mr. Knightley says regarding Mr. Woodhouse’s depression about the marriage of the Westons (9). The two in question, though, are sneakily not the Westons but Emma and her father, the latter of whom Emma spares from Knightley’s wit by redirecting the bon mot toward herself: “one of those two is such a fanciful, troublesome creature!” (9). Of course Knightley does mean the father, who, despite Emma’s efforts to shield, knows it and owns it: “‘I believe it is very true, my dear, indeed,’ said Mr. Woodhouse with a sigh. ‘I am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome’” (9)—perhaps not so obtuse after all. Emma endeavors to twist it again: “Mr. Knightley loves to find fault with me you know—in a joke—it is all a joke” (9). Yet this joke, like the joke that is Mr. Woodhouse, appears to be no laughing matter, which is why Emma is at such pains to transform this accurate, jokeless observation into a joke. The trick of the joke, however, is that Mr. Woodhouse wins this exchange of wit (at least by novel’s end), and the evils of the marriage state are stood in clear relief. According to the novel, it is better to be a one and not a two—and if that fails, if marriage must occur, then it is better to be a three than a two, which Emma and Knightley, of all people, end up agreeing with!

I’d like to say that this moment, this ménage, of eclaircissement, to use Austen’s word from her “Plan for a Novel,” explains something mysterious about the counterrevolutionary nature of her novels: that they are always actively working to nobble the very marriage plot they appear so invested in advancing and advocating.3 Perversely and paradoxically, the marriage plot has long obscured this radical aspect of her work, as it has edulcorated the very façade her work wishes to tear down, positioning her as that most heteronormative of authors in the popular imagination, if not, given the immense range of her fame across such a landscape, the pages of literary history. It is the task of this book to show how this is not so.

In actuality, her novels’ dearest ambitions are to stage a resistance to what Lee Edelman calls reproductive futurism: the replication of heteronormativity in the phantasmal figure and figment of the Child in the future that rebounds into the present that we can easily understand the marriage state existing to forward. This form of the biopolitical, the recreation of a certain species—the heteronormative—in the present by way of the future comes alive by relying on rigid conceptions of gender that imprison men and women in a kind of cisheteropatriarchal prison. Struggling against the ideologies of cisheteronormative gender is why her characters—and equally that famous Austen Voice—spend much of the novels either fervently setting their faces against or languidly indifferent to (or sometimes both, if we buy Emma’s explanations) the very marriage plot they find themselves unwilling participants in. Claudia Johnson gets at some of this hesitancy when she writes that “Austen’s notorious refusal to depict her heroines in the act of saying ‘yes’ to proposals of marriage . . . is often chalked up to inadequacy.”4 If it does, she writes, “indicate an authorial inability . . . it is only an inability to crack the ironclad logic of female delicacy, according to which a proper woman openly and ardently avowing intense personal desire can be scarcely imagined, much less represented.” True, oh, true, but what’s more, and this is the truly deadly heart of the matter for Austen, the novels seem to see the binaristic logic of gender as foundational to Regency-era England, and even more universally, society itself—along with, of course, what Sara Ahmed calls the phenomenology of whiteness such a society produces.5 To be clear, it is not marriage itself that Austen perceives and therefore targets as the ultimate problem; rather, for her, it is society’s belief in a binaristic biological determinism (or biological essentialism; pick your terminological poison) that dictates the duopoly of male and female genders as, well, irreducibly absolute and irrepressibly necessary.

As but one example, as Johnson has noted, Austen’s novels themselves were entrapped in these “male” and “female” categories because these were labels appended to the novels by reviewers (and society) of her time—certain kinds of novels were considered female and others male. It is perhaps no small wonder, then, that Austen wants to turn the tables on such forced unfortunate first impressions attributed to her novels that marginalize them by means of the suggestion that they concern themselves only with the so-called products of the female imagination, sensibility, as well as—whether loving or loveless—an obsession with a marriage whose final ambition is to perpetuate the patrilineal estate. Repeated rather endlessly by now, the work of such gender logic contributes to the debatable, oft-questioned two-sex male/female model Thomas Lacquer argues emerges during the Enlightenment.6 Despite the enduring appeal of Lacquer’s thesis, it has long been challenged, and trans scholars have recently shown how such a story fails to account for the multiplicative genders of the eighteenth century. As Julia Ftacek summarizes it, gender in the period is still interminably fluid and nonteleological; it has no totalized end point as male or female, which coincides with Jen Manion’s historical research on the period in Female Husbands, wherein she writes, “we might view the subjects of this book as traveling through life, establishing an ongoing and ever-unfolding relationship with gender, rather than viewing them as simply shifting between two unchanging binaries.”7 Ftacek explains it: “biological destiny” is sliding not secured prior to its social rigidification near the end of the century (a fluidity that Jordy Rosenberg vividly depicts in a contemporary queer, transgender writing of the eighteenth century in his novel Confessions of the Fox, which illustrates the gendered reality of the time rather than the creative and critical fictions we have for so long written about the fictions of the period). Only at century’s end does, say, the possession of a penis label you “irrecoverably” a man.8 Or, as Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska put it, “We do want to insist on the fact that binary approaches to theorizing gender have a history and are not unchanging transhistorical universalisms.”9 If gender is a construct based on the supposed realities of biological determinism, then we might allege that the eighteenth century was still busily drafting the architectural (and archi-textural, hence the male and female novel categories) cisheteropatriarchal master building plan meant to settle down the rowdiness still rocking up in marriage—look at Emma, Knightley, and Woodhouse! Again, Austen’s novels resist the affianced closure they seem intent on achieving.

This is all to say that we have never fully dealt with gender in Austen because, like reviewers of her time, immured in the ideologies of heterodox cisheteropatriarchy, that men are men and women are women, we continue to misread Austen, mishearing what she wrote through the mores of our own time that dictate a type of close reading all the more mondegreen for its misapplicable and decisively historicist wrongness.10 For so long, until fairly recently, cultural and literary studies have construed gender as a social construct, which can tend to erase the body’s fluid materialism under the crossing outs of the social performativity of gender (not that they must be antagonists, or even uncomplimentary). Close readings and historicisms of these sorts assume the very premises that Austen wishes to subvert are valid and in doing so, always find exactly what they presume will be there: the cisheteronormative marriage plot. Austen World thus becomes cisheteronormative through and through even as this reading obscures and elides the full spectrum of genders (and sexualities, for that matter) that live and circulate in her novels, be they genderqueer, transgender, gender-fluid, nonbinary, or agender.

While Austen critics such as Mary Poovey and Johnson both contend that Austen is a reformist progressive who undercuts the marriage plot to create space for women’s autonomy and independence, Austen, I think, actually takes things much further. Upending marriage has a distinctive corollary: it explodes the binaristic foundation that dictates male/female gender variation and that, somewhat tautologically, finds, in reaction, cisheteronormative codification in the men-and-women-who-wed binarism of marriage. This nonbinaristic desire does not make Austen a revolutionary in the sense of someone who radicalizes the liberal or conservative politics of her day to refashion them as progressive along a trajectory she favors. Of Austen’s politics, then, I want to say that, in terms of the long-standing, ongoing debate about whether they are progressive or conservative, Austen falls on neither side. Rather, she is more radical, calling for a new society where gender politics and the attendant, emerging, and eventually emergent politics of the marriage state—but more, the binaristic logic that motivates, motors, and mobilizes both—are no longer operative.

Instead, the architextural ossature of her novels is built on a logaoedic rhythm that does not chime with her own time but instead flenses determinative logic about gender in order to first flout it, then abandon it altogether (to mix metaphors). In short, Austen looks at the future much in the fashion José Esteban Muñoz does regarding queer utopia (which extends Foucault’s thinking about pleasure, as we see below): “the here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”11 What I’m getting at is that in abolishing the binaries that underline gender, Austen’s aspiration is, as grandiose as it may sound to say, nothing less than the complete abolition of what she sees as a regressive social order that disallows, among other things, her own eudaimonia.

Austen is here in line with both Foucault and current transgender and nonbinary studies. Rarely noticed in readings of Foucault—no doubt because of a certain tergiversation in his actual books—is that he favors the abolition of gender and sexuality as hegemonic identities, as either social productions or metaphysical ontologies that purport to capture the whole person. He doesn’t say it in A History of Sexuality, but, as Leo Bersani claims, “the descriptive aspect of volume 1 . . . is inseparable from its prescriptive intentions”—or, we might say, the denotative becomes connotative.12 The same goes for volumes 2 and 3, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. The great secret of volume 1 of History of Sexuality in fact is that despite the volume’s title, Foucault is not interested in gender or sex, or even sexuality per se.13 Rather, his archaeology circles around the constitution of the modern liberal subject (“in short, it as a matter of seeing how an ‘experience’ came to be constituted in modern Western societies, an experience that caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a ‘sexuality’”; and “to understand how the modern individual could experience himself as a subject of a ‘sexuality’”) and the various discourses of and related to sexuality that has come to produce and define this subject through identification as heterosexual, homosexual, and so on.14 Modern subjectivity’s constitution, Foucault alleges, is contingent on sexuality; it could easily have been otherwise, given the eddies of history, which is to say that the subject could have been constituted elsewise; it just has so fallen out that that least repressed of discourses, sexuality, in our attempts to repress it—discourse to repress it promulgates and proliferates it—took on that constitutive role. As Foucault sees it, this happenstance of history, identifying sexually, to say, for instance, I’m here and I’m queer, is, for Foucault, if not exactly unfortunate, at least cause for concern, because it is what makes the modern subject legible to power, legible to forces of what he calls biopower and governmentality, wherein it is easier for power (whatever that ultimately means in Foucault) to incorporate the subject, because now the subject is recognizable as a particular category to power, legible to panoptic logic, legible into and under, even as, the regime of social norms and control. Sexuality delineates a legible subject to power that now knows how to properly incarcerate, medicalize, surveil, discipline, and punish, say, the one who identifies as a homosexual because there are “proper” modes of dealing with such a subject. Identity is assimilationist and homonormative. Identity even contributes, as Jasbir Puar shows, to homonationalism in that it relies on racist assumptions about who counts as a national subject—straight, white, Christian folks—and is used to unqueer queerness in order to brand U.S. politics as somehow progressive and tolerant (contra, in this distortion, politics in majority Muslim countries) in its assimilative, incorporative manhandling of queerness that, finally, flattens difference to more effectively manipulate it as nationalist propaganda.15

If we follow Foucault, then, to resist these carceral hetero- and homonormativizing techniques of power, we need to move instead to discuss our pleasures, “a positive economy of the body and of pleasure”—whether sexual acts as acts we understand, stricto sensu, as sexual or not—rather than create ontologies of identity because many people engage in similar sexual acts whether they are straight or gay or what have you.16 As he puts it near the end of volume 1, “it is from the agency of sex that one has to free oneself if one wishes, through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality, to assert, against the hold of power, the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the apparatus of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”17 In this regard, one might say, that although they claim different sexual identities in terms of their pleasures, it is Christian evangelicals who have much in common with gay men in regard to anal sex as a result of Christian notions about hymeneal virginity and vaginal penetration as heretically immoral, leading to the flourishing of anal sex among unmarried Christian men and women because God is, according to their hymeneal logic, not condemnatory of that sexual act because it preserves sexual innocence. Indeed, God approves, on this Christian evangelical logic, of anal sexual—and queer sex in general; King James I would have been so pleased, as Austen herself is well aware.

What’s more, for Foucault, creativity as the care of the self is much more important than identity:

Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they have to “uncover” their “own identity,” and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is “Does this thing conform to my identity?” then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule.18

Warning against recuperative homonormativity (“the old heterosexual virility”) and a universalizing essentialism, Foucault pushes individuality to its limit to break it, to shatter self-conception as telos in favor of the ongoing ongoingness, the self’s self-differentiation, of the self as “creation” and “innovation.” One will no longer be boring because one will no longer ever be the same, if same means something like self-same once self-made. Hence, he turns to ascesis, and hence, the use of pleasure is deeply implicated in the care of the self: “the relation to self is also defined as a concrete relationship enabling one to delight in oneself, as in a thing one both possesses and has before one’s eyes.”19 And “the experience of self that forms itself in this possession is not simply that of a force overcome, or a rule exercised over a power that is on the point of rebelling; it is the experience of a pleasure that one takes in oneself. The individual who has finally succeeded in gaining access to himself is, for himself, an object of pleasure.”20 The multiplicative effect of centering pleasure as the primary discourse to deal with identity would work just like the proliferation of discourse on sexuality: it would create that which was supposedly already a given although nominally repressed, and in so doing promote new forms of collectivity and solidarity through nonidentitarian individuality. Many people engage in oral and anal and vaginal sex, in BDSM acts, in fist fucking (the latter two are Foucault’s primary examples), and indeed in any number of erotic scenarios; so in what we might be inclined to call Foucault’s nonidentitarianism, these acts cut across categorizations like gay, straight, and on and on. This, for lack of a better word, which might be the wrong one, undercommons of pleasure abolishes identity to make resistance from pleasure—which never stops pleasuring itself. As Foucault writes in volume 2, “there are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.”21 In her novels, Austen readily cosigns this thinking otherwise than one’s self in order to think the self. The creation of the self in and as pleasure, taking pleasure in one’s self, asks, then, that one think differently than one’s self, to experience the limit case of the self qua self as also the self if one is to be a self at all. What is important here, in other words, is that this perhaps mis(un[der])reading of Foucault positions him as radically abolitionist in that pleasuring ourselves, or to put it differently, looking and reflecting at all, as he suggests we do, would, in effect, abolish sexuality and gender as stable modes of identity altogether in favor of a cross-whatnot appeal of resistance to power.

Would Foucault have thought the same about gender-fluid, trans, and nonbinary identities as he did about sexual identity? Well, time is a perhaps hand. But I think it is easy to see him agreeing with Jules Gill-Peterson’s ambivalence re. trans visibility as one of the perils of identity: “Black trans critics have made overwhelmingly persuasive arguments that visibility is a technology of subjection. The rise in trans visibility coincides with increased policing, regulation, violence, and immiseration that hits trans people unevenly by race, class, and gender.”22 Dean Spade sees similar immiseration at work in his study of power and the law in regards to the lives of transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people. Spade hits at the same solution I’ve decided Austen and Foucault would land at: abolition. Moten and Harney get at this idea in full in The Undercommons: “what is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”23 On rubble one can build. Turned in the direction of, and from, Austen, we would say that the point is really not so much to abolish gender but to abolish a society that could have these types of carceral logics of gender, that could have gender as a prison. For just this reason, the abolition of a society focused on power and leveraging it on legible marginalized populations, means, as Gill-Peterson warns, “we don’t want a trans state, or a nonbinary state either. State power folding us in is not the solution to its monopoly on violence and public life.”24 The self and its identity, of any sort, becoming the law of, and over and under, the state is simply another institution of an assimilative carceral institution. As Reinna Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, editors of Trap Door, put it, “the trap of the visual” on one hand proffers trans representation that will, supposedly, lead to acceptance and liberation, even as, at the same time, antitrans violence is on the rise and the two are “entwined.”25 State power, the state, society—all of these amount to, in the case of the visibility of queer, transgender, gender-fluid, intersex, nonbinary identities, institutionalized vehicles of violence that code for how to surveil, manage, damage, and put to necropolitical death these lives. But we should also note, as Gill-Peterson says, that while the “biopolitical turn in transgender studies . . . has been incredibly generative in identifying how trans life has been operationalized by normalizing governmental techniques,” that same turn “also tends to follow Michel Foucault’s lead in abstracting the category of ‘race’ out of its own historicity, abandoning the centrality of colonialism and transatlantic slavery to the racialized modernity of the human.”26

One goal of “abolition and gender radicality,” then, as Marquis Bey puts it, is to embrace “Black feminism’s radicality, that perpetual refusal of institutionalization” that “manifests as an attunement to the regimes of ontological genders and works those regulative traps by unsuturing them and fracturing gender’s impositions. Black feminism and its underpinning trans feminism mutate the state’s attempt and function to render things immobile, a function Michel Foucault has noted, and names that which cannot be kept in place or moored to the normative ledgers of history.”27 What is wanted, Bey writes, are “conditions otherwise, ways of being and becoming that are to be unenamored of the conceit of this world’s supposed correctness that they find solace in how we unbecome, how we un/gender ourselves and others in order to relate to power in illegible and subversive ways.”28 Crucially, what is at stake in Austen is similar in that her work’s historicism is an unmooring from history, from the stability of a gender society, that spotlights as a target it knows how to deal with in one way or another, usually with the ultimate biopolitical goal of heteronormative marriage on its carceral mind. For this reason, Austen resides in the camp that wants to abolish any society that would have gender as a prison.

This is a book of history, then. Of both Austen’s history and ours. And the history in and of the world of her writing and ours. It may be that, as Gossett, Stanley, and Burton, write, “art, in its most expansive definition, is central to our collective liberation.”29 If so, Austen’s art, this book wants to argue in and through its historicism, is perhaps one humble tribut(ary)e to such liberation. Fair warning, though. In this history, in this (non)(mis)reading of Austen, there is a word that never appears but that is key to Austen’s text. It is something of a hapax legomenon, except it also is not, in that it never appears. It is something of a cryptonym, then, but I am not going to tell you what it is—although if you look closely enough, you might find it. It’s a letter that never (always) reaches its destination, writing on the recto and verso of a postcard right out in the open. It is a word that appears between but outside binary and nonbinary, words, categories, that repeat the binary, and as such, this word is what nonbinary says when it says itself but as yet cannot give tongue to—certainly not a paleonymy. And this does mean that the book’s title is liquescent. Perhaps, then, this book is just a singular rewriting of Austen, although it is never, I hope, a rewriting in the sense of an apophasis or negative theology, more so, so to say, a (dis)paralogism (I have so few words with which to say my few, that is to say). Well, anyway, let’s hope it isn’t Verschlimmbessern.

Nor is the book anti-identitarian in terms of Edelman’s queer negativity antirelationalism, but nonidentitarian in terms of Bey’s black trans feminism that is nonidentitarian insofar as it abolishes identity altogether to make room for a capacious ongoing becoming—“it is in this black feminist milieu that we become-together: become queer, become trans, become black, become fugitive”—such that the book, no less Austen, cannot be pro- or anti- what never did, and does no longer, exist.30 So it is not anti-identitarian. It is not, in this sense, the typical history that tracks and traces a forgotten or neglected event or set of circumstances, or even a book of history that works from an archive in a Foucauldian manner to follow, divulge, and analyze the undisclosed or misrecognized discursive necropolitical exercise of power formations that crisscross, structure, and network sociocultural and individual life. Rather, this is a history in the mode of C. Riley Snorton, who writes, “for many, it will not be understood as history at all.”31 Although Snorton works with/in an archive, the methodology of his book signals its departure from typical historical models of procedure. As Snorton sees it, historical methodologies, and history itself, are foundationally structured and driven, riven, by a binaristic logic that produces cultural hegemonies and the material realities of power divisions and social injustice. Snorton therefore eschews a “binaristic logic that might reify a distinction between transgender and cisgender, black and white, disabled and abled, and so on, in an effort to think expansively about how blackness and black studies, and transness and trans studies, yield insights that surpass an additive logic.”32 Additive logic serves to reinforce binaristic foundationalism by, for instance, affirming a fixity to gender—however simultaneously counterintuitively fluid and paradoxically stable it might be said to be—as, for example, cis- or transgender. For Snorton, here, I think, if gender is indeed slippery-sliding for everyone, then this applies to cisgender folks as well, whose gender is never stable, natal, or transcendental—even if they do not know this or accept it, similar to what Kadji Amin argues about how cisgender does not exist whereas nonbinary, perhaps, captures us all in the capaciousness of its Beyian umbrella.33 Surpassing such an additive logic might be, we could say, the very purpose of nonbinary: to dispense with the mathematical calculation that instigates difference as ontological or political difference from, rather than celebration with and as and in, an endless parade of becoming. Politically speaking, we could say that Austen’s electoral platform is to abolish mathematics. Vote Austen: she won’t count you out!

Of course, to rewind back to Gill-Peterson’s point concerning Foucauldian historicism’s racial occultation, Austen and whiteness seem inextricable as an identity that has (and will) always already have voted for itself. Yet we might pause here (at the voting booth, as it were). Such inextricability seems to cherish or cling to what Moten describes as “concern over the supposedly stultifying force of authenticity exerted by restrictive and narrow conceptions of blackness, worry over the supposed intranational dominance of blackness broadly and unrigorously conceived (in ways that presuppose its strict biological limitation within an unlimited minoritarian field), or anxiety over the putatively intradiasporic hegemony of a certain mode of blackess (which presumes national as well as biological determinations that are continually over- and under-determined).”34 Authenticity, nationalism, biological determinism, although running operationally differently in terms of Blackness than gender, count the color line as a binaristic nonsynergizable dysalignment. Worries and suppositions of this kind that Moten seeks to unwork see, so to say, only this type of binarism as electable. For Moten, though, Blackness “occurs” before ontology, before any being, and as such escapes the binaristic entrapment of the Western metaphysics of presence that excludes in its putative Enlightenment inclusiveness: “blackness is prior to ontology; or . . . blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space.”35 It is for this reason that, he writes, “ultimately, the paraontological force that is transmitted in the long chain of life and death performances that are the concern of black studies is horribly misunderstood if it is understood as exclusive. Everyone whom blackness claims, which is to say everyone, can claim blackness.”36 Blackness, as anti- or antefoundational to ontology, precedes everything, and in itself does possess everyone. Blackness is, in other words, the predifferential paraontological generative matrix of differentiation itself. In the beginning was Blackness, and it was differentiation before the beginning. It is also why Blackness claims us all and we can claim it, even as Blackness is not necessarily, therefore, to be Black, as Moten says. Moten’s Blackness is what trans is for some trans scholars: Blackness, like transness, is generative, is generativity itself. And, we might say, following what Bey calls, seriatim to Moten’s logic, “the trans*ness of Blackness, the Blackness of trans*ness,” in which trans itself is paraontologically parallel to Blackness because trans is irruptive ontologically too, that this, then, decenters—in a crucial move toward abolition—whiteness and cisheteropatriarchy, mainstays of necropolitical anti-Blackness and anti-transness.37 Becoming a Black trans woman, as Bey has it, explodes these categories such that the capaciousness (capacious as capacity, the flux capacitor and flux capacity) of Black trans feminism leads to abolition, as it does for Moten—not, crucially, to an abolition of difference because paraontological Black transness is always already there, but to an exponentiality of difference such that it exceeds and overwhelms the narrowness of carceral race and gender. In this regard, I’m trying to read Austen from a Black studies angle, just as Moten says he does with Shakespeare and with Samuel Richardson (Austen’s favorite author, let’s recall) “as a kind of instance of the eruptive force of blackness in and through and against the very idea of the work,” or, as he writes concerning his writing on Freud and Marx, to “put it in a simple kind of way I would say that the way I read Freud and Marx is that they are a part of the black radical tradition.”38

This is to read, even if it is impossible, Austen in the Black radical tradition, as Moten does Freud and Marx. Because this is not a book about Austen in the sense of the person but rather the Austen-to-come—the Austen always already to-come from a certain building–destruction that is always more and less and the same than the deconstruction that is abolition. It follows LaFleur, Raskolnikov, and Klosowska, who warn that trans studies “is vulnerable to a form of historical scholarship that focuses more heavily on individual people than on the structures, affects, or logics that inform the experience of gender, its social and political performance, and how those structures, affects, and logics are portable for the project of meaning making beyond individual trans lives.”39 Not a trans-ing project, Nonbinary Jane Austen looks beyond the individual to think these “structures, affects, or logics.” After all, as LaFleur, Raskolnikov, and Klosowska write, “if gender normativity is in fact a fiction, then is has centuries of fictions that refuse it too.”40 The book, the project, the love is to radically think Austen to undo this world as she does/wishes/us to do/wish. It is a tendentiousness that abrades its own perspective in its very abrasiveness, chiasmatically, as it takes its risks, as its risks risk risk. In other words, it is not a reclamation project of Austen or for whiteness or whiteness’s sake, but rather to show how Blackness and transness, as Moten and Bey argue, claim us all, and how Austen rewrites Austen to be for her, to be for us, to be something elsewise elsewhen.

Austen therefore, I want to argue, aligns with Moten and Bey and has no interest in reforming any social system built on the binaristic predicates Snorton mentions; instead, she promulgates the erasure of carceral gender societies in order to open up all of gender’s possibilities without prophesying a fully fleshed-out—and also in the sense of not knowing what bodies and lives will be—future already determined by existing structures. This is much akin to what Bey writes: “we don’t know what will arise. . . . To claim to know in advance would belie the aim, as we would only entrench what might be into the current we have at our disposal. We don’t know, and that is okay. We just want something else, a something we do not know yet.”41 It is, Bey posits, to defy “the dominant logic of identity . . . that assumes that ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are fixed and knowable” and to instead recognize and affirm “a transitive property here connoting trans/figuration, and thus also black trans feminism, as a subversive mutability able to pass into different conditions”42—in short, the future in its unknowability that we yearn for, a future that lives for all lives, as Snorton says. Or, as Jian Neo Chen and micha cárdenas write regarding their issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly on trans temporality, “the authors and artists in this special issue not only imagine livable futures for trans people but also call into question the linear and universal times of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. They imagine trans times as containing pockets of slowness, dead-end diversions, and the openness of multiplicity.”43

To put it the same way differently, Austen imagines a nonbinary future that moves beyond the fictions of binaristic gender that found reification in the cisheteropatriarchal marriage plots of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel and its cultural backdrop as they have traditionally been read. For Austen, this nonbinary society-to-come takes the form in her fiction of radically multiplying genders to the point of abolishing the duopolistic fiction of male and female gender altogether and any society that would have them. Such “a critical focus,” that is to say, as Amin writes concerning transgender temporality, “may open the way toward a more transformative politics of justice.”44