Pictured: Lithograph image of Mary Jones from the Harry T. Peters “America on Stone” Lithography Collection, National Museum of American History. Henry R. Robinson, New York: 1836.
“Attending to the lost trans women of history becomes a kind of care work, a working through of my own existential dysphoria and a righting of the wrong articulated by my dysphoric critique.”
PhD candidate Eamon Schlotterback has published an essay titled, “‘I Always Dressed This Way:’ Surfacing Nineteenth Century Trans History Through Mary Jones” on the online blog Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies. Drawing upon research collected for the Digital Transgender Archive, Schlotterback employs archival objects to understand the life of Mary Jones, a trans woman of color in the mid-nineteenth century, arguing that these objects speak to both forms of oppression against trans people and trans perseverance that persist in the present.
