TRANS DOUBLING AND THE HETEROTOPIA OF ILLUSION IN THE WIDOW RANTER

In the play, both the Widow Ranter and Semernia dress in men’s clothing to disguise themselves in the scene of battle. This trans doubling creates an opportunity for thinking about the intersections of queerness, transness, and racial fungibility.²⁴ Both characters also portray elements of cross-cultural characteristics. For example, the Widow smokes tobacco, even though, as Edith Snook argues, “Tobacco … is central to many Native American stories and sacred rituals … Yet, in the play, tobacco belongs only to the Settlers.”²⁵ By contrast, Semernia is given elements of English monarchical grandeur.²⁶ This mixing of gender and racial characteristics is part of the play’s depiction of the colony as a space of experimentation and unconventionality. Ultimately, the play is unable to sustain a space in which settlers and Indigenous people can coexist, and in a move that feels remarkably contemporary, it makes space for settler trans representation (the Widow) even as it kills off the trans person of color who is also an Indigenous woman (Semernia).²⁷ The play thus reinforces C. Riley Snorton’s argument in Black on Both Sides that “the condensation of transness into the category of transgender is a racial narrative,” while also epitomizing the “impasse” between Indigenous studies and queer studies that Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd characterizes as “an erasure that shadows the dispossessive regimes of settler colonialism that has already conditioned Indigenous presence, knowledge, and livability.”²⁸ The queerness of works like The Widow Ranter and the trans capacity of the play are entwined with the discourses of imperial conquest, white supremacy, slavery, and genocide, even as its queerness and trans capacity offer moments of resistance to discourses of racial and national hegemony.

Cavarnio speaks to Bacon about his people’s prior claims to the Virginia land in terms that, like Oroonoko’s indictments of slavery, appear to offer such a moment of resistance: “We were monarchs once of all this spacious world, till you an unknown people landing here, distressed and ruined by destructive storms, abusing all our charitable hospitality, usurped our right, and made your friends your slaves.”²⁹ His speech here is one such moment that initially appears to “activate an Indigenous perspective” in the play, to use Dawn Morgan’s figuration.³⁰ However, the power of Cavarnio’s claim is undercut by much of the rest of the action of the play, in which the land remains in the hands of the usurpers. Part of the complexity of The Widow Ranter lies in its queer failure to make good on the promises that the heterotopia of the colony and the theater hold out.³¹

Foucault’s heterotopia describes a real space that is somehow also unreal; in the heterotopia, “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.”³² And yet, The Widow Ranter cannot fully reject or criticize the growing European interests in defining racial and national hierarchies in which Indigenous people figure as inferior. If, as Byrd argues, the constraints of queer studies and Indigenous studies create “an assertion of de/colonial difference enacted as and for the real,” then the heterotopia of the play and the trans doubling of Ranter and Semernia within it draw attention to the de/colonial difference between Indigenous women and settler women—a difference that cannot be resolved within the heterotopia of the play.³³ The Virginia colony is not a heterotopia of compensation, as Foucault theorizes colonial spaces; instead, it is the heterotopia of illusion: “Their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.”³⁴ Indeed, Behn’s heterotopia reveals the illusory nature of gender and class, positing a fluid space in which to play with both, rendering the theatrical space one of experimentation and critique wherein power, social hierarchies, the law, and social structures like marriage are exposed as mere social constructs. Race and nationality, however, act as the two constants that cannot be made playful or revealed as illusory, and, in fact, the play constructs the national differences between the Indigenous and the English as racial.

Another aspect of the play’s complexity and its opacity pertains to the specificity in choosing to set the action within the historical events of Bacon’s Rebellion, and the changes that Behn makes to historical facts.³⁵ Behn’s play removes Virginia governor William Berkeley from the action of the play, creating a power vacuum that the rebel Nathaniel Bacon wishes to fill. Similarly, The Widow Ranter portrays Bacon as a romantic hero in love with the Indian Queen Semernia. The play depicts the colonial tensions in broad strokes, eliding or omitting some of the Indigenous groups of Virginia that were involved in the conflict, such as the Doeg and the Susquehannock, but alludes to at least one group overtly, the Pamunkey, in a reference that is both historically accurate but also mired in Pocahontas mythology:³⁶ Semernia explains to her servant Anaria that she first met Bacon “at twelve years old—at the Paumungian court I saw this conqueror.”³⁷ Some scholars have also drawn attention to the potential historical basis for Semernia, the Pamunkey queen Cockacoeske who served as leader of the Pamunkey from 1656 until her death and was an ally of the English Crown but also a skilled diplomat.³⁸ The play merges fact and allusion with fantasy and poetic license while also engaging Restoration Era theater norms and their penchant for breeches parts, which allowed for the appearance of scantily clad actresses on stage in men’s clothing.³⁹ Taken together, the play offers up a dizzying array of gender-bending possibilities and queer desires that ultimately reinforce reproductive futurity and imperial racial hierarchies.

TRANSING GENDER, SETTLER COLONIALISM, AND THE WIDOW RANTER

Despite her small role in the grand scheme of events in the play, the Widow Ranter’s role within this heterotopia of illusion is notable, as she reveals just how tenuous gender binaries are in the colony. Her cross-gender representation begins long before she dons men’s clothing. She is coarse, unrefined, and given to ranting, in both the modern sense as well as in the sense of the religious dissenters, the Ranters, of the mid-1600s, whose women were often caricaturized as loud-mouthed and sexually liberated viragos.⁴⁰ When she enters the stage in Act I, Scene 3, one of the first actions she takes is to order a boy to go get her “some pipes and a bowl of punch” for “I must smoke and drink in a morning, or I am maukish all day.”⁴¹ Though “maukish” here may signal a parodic indictment of the confines of womanhood, there is much in the Widow’s characterization that can be read as refusing genteel femininity: she smokes tobacco, drinks punch in the morning, swears, threatens, and is belligerent. In speaking of the man she loves, the Widow states, “I hope I shall not find that rogue Daring here, sniveling after Mrs Chrisante: if I do, by the Lord, I’ll lay him thick. Pox on him, why should I love the dog.”⁴² Her language is brash and full of bravado even when speaking of her feelings for Daring and her fears for Daring’s life, exhorting Friendly, who fights against Bacon, “Hark ye, Charles, by heaven if you kill my Daring I’ll pistol you.”⁴³

Her aggressive masculine bluster combined with her boldness and bravery contrasts with the cowardice of many of the men of the colony, including the Justices of the Peace Timerous, Whimsey, Whiff, and Boozer. Male-bodiedness, as many texts of female soldiers in subsequent decades suggest, does not directly correlate with masculine qualities such as bravery, boldness, or patriotism.⁴⁴ The figure of the Widow epitomizes the trans capacity of the play by destabilizing gender binaries through her refusal of stereotypical feminine norms, while her butch description also has a sapphic resonance that cannot be erased by her declarations of love for Daring.

Ranter’s cross-gender appearance in the battle scene further cements the play’s representation of white, transmasculine citizenship in the service of settler colonialism. Ranter dresses in men’s clothing to find Daring during the battle, but also to pull him away from Chrisante. She presents herself to Daring and his friend Fearless, masquerading as a lover to Chrisante. Daring is initially unaware of the trick; once Fearless explains to Daring that the lover is in fact Ranter in disguise and that she loves him, Daring comes around. He begins to play along, mocking Ranter while still pretending he does not recognize her. Only after teasing her into anger does Daring reveal that he knows she is the Widow and that she loves him. Daring, who only recently was sighing after Chrisante, suddenly declares his love for the Widow and persuades her to marry him immediately—without her changing back into women’s clothing. He explains, “Nay, prithee, take me in the humour, while thy breeches are on—for I never liked thee half so well in petticoats.”⁴⁵ His desire for her in breeches functions as a humorous critique of gender roles: for all his protestations, Daring is happy to exchange the virginal and rather boring Chrisante for the masculine virago Ranter. Later, in the final scenes of reconciliation among all parties, Ranter, who had been taken prisoner by Hazard, is returned to Daring. When Ranter complains to her love that he abandoned her “scurvily in Battel,” Daring replies, “That was to see how well you cou’d shift for your self, now I find you can bear the brunt of a Campaign you are a fit Wife for a Soldier.”⁴⁶ Daring’s preference for a partner who is “fit” to be a soldier’s mate, along with his earlier desire that Ranter remain in breeches, reinforces the idea that certain trans identities may in fact be ideal for the survival of the colony.

Ranter’s eventual union with Daring, one of the heroes of the play, signals a union of competing but equally important qualities for the survival of the colony: boldness and daring, loyalty and tenderness. From another perspective, though, the Widow herself is all these things even without Daring. She embodies the ideal colonial citizen by combining masculine-coded heroism and resourcefulness with the female-bodied ability to birth children who will be future citizens of the colony, revealing how transgender citizenship is invested in reproductive futurity. The Widow survives and thrives in the American colonies. The resourceful white Englishwoman becomes, in fact, the building block of the colonies and Britain’s power abroad. Moreover, the colonies, as portrayed in the play, are a dangerous space for men, who may die of disease or in battle, thus leaving their wives and daughters unprotected—or available to remarry with money to burn. Though the white women captured by Bacon’s troops remind us that the colonies held dangers for women as well, Behn’s play centers the conveniences and possibilities open to the white female colonists. Madame Surelove runs her own business, Chrisante’s father must eventually allow her to marry the man of her choice, and the Widow has money, bad manners, and the man of her dreams. Semernia stands in stark contrast to these women, as her choices are contained by the colonial space rather than expanded by it. She must stand by her husband Cavarnio and by her people, unable to act on her passion for Bacon except when it is too late, and her actions lead to her death. In the case of Ranter, we see Saxton’s argument that the queer potentials of Behn’s work are “consistently foreclosed” confirmed. Ranter’s status as a gender outlaw is made comic and finally neutralized by marriage to Daring, and Ranter and Daring, as surprisingly suitable partners, symbolize a middle-class settler colonist family structure built on the qualities of transgender citizenship.

TRANSING GENDER, QUEER SUBJECTS, AND SEMERNIA

The spectacle of cross-dressing by women of two different races in a colonial setting sets up a contrast between these women, whose different ultimate fates, tragic and comic, reveal who has a future in the colonies and who does not. However much lip service the play may give to Indigenous sovereignty in the form of Cavarnio’s one short speech, it is impossible to overlook the stereotyped, essentializing, and exoticizing representation of Indigenous people, especially in a play where the Indigenous characters are all dead by the end. The Widow Ranter can be understood as a text that “discursively vacates the Indigenous from the Indigenous” in that it homogenizes disparate Indigenous groups, emphasizes stereotyped tropes of Native women who desire white men, and removes tobacco from its Indigenous context and reassigns it to the settler colonial lifestyle, as Lenape scholar Joanne Barker describes.⁴⁷ Finally, the play erases the Indigenous woman from the action of the play doubly: first, by equating her with a white woman via cross-dressing and secondly by having her die, by the hand of her white lover, no less. The doubling of cross-dressing similarly “translates [Semernia] into normative gendered and sexed bodies” of the colonizer.⁴⁸ Mi’kmaq scholar Robbie Richardson, writing of The Female American, a 1767 novel that stages similar normative horizons, concludes that “The Indian-Briton [Unca Eliza] (or perhaps Briton-Indian) of The Female American does not function in a way meant to appropriate the virtues of the Indians, but rather to introduce European virtue among them.”⁴⁹ Notably, The Widow Ranter assigns noble European virtues to Cavarnio and Semernia as part of their role as King and Queen of their people; there is very little “Indian” about them to begin with. According to Rebecca Lush, “Behn even attempts to portray a polyvocal perspective; however, the Indians of Behn’s play merely ventriloquize English colonial ideas despite the significant sections of dialogue assigned to them.”⁵⁰ The play merges European class-based virtues into the colonial context to create characters whose deaths, like those of Oroonoko and Imoinda, are tragic because of the characters’ status but also because of the inevitability of their deaths.

Like Ranter, Semernia also appears in men’s clothing in the second half of the play to enter the scene of battle in disguise. For Semernia, though, cross-dressing leads to her demise.⁵¹ Dressed as an “Indian man” along with her maid and several other of her people, she attempts to flee the English, only to have her guards surprised by Bacon and his men. Unlike the Widow, Semernia declares that she is not war-like and “ha[s] no Amazonian fire about [her].”⁵² Yet, when the Indian men with her declare they will shoot poison arrows at Bacon, Semernia, who cannot stand the thought of Bacon’s dying, runs into the fray, shouting, “Hold, hold, I do command ye.”⁵³ She is courageous—but only when the life of her lover is on the line. The stage directions inform us that subsequently, “Bacon flies on them as they shoot and miss him, and fights like a Fury, and wounds the Queen in the disorder.”⁵⁴ Semernia’s masculine disguise is partly responsible for her death even as it reminds us, however briefly, of the fluidity of gender roles and the trans capacity of the play.

At the same time, though, the word “Amazonian” conjures up stereotyped, exoticized accounts of Indigenous women by white imperialists of earlier decades. As Sydnee Wagner notes, early English reports from the Americas described “the Amazonian cannibal woman [as] a transmasculine figure.”⁵⁵ Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1596 account of The Discoverie of Guiana presents “Amazonian cannibal women [as] gender-deviant as well as fierce, savage, and hypersexual; as such, they were entirely outside the ideals of white femininity.”⁵⁶ Such characterizations of Indigenous women were common; Byrd argues that “the Indigenous is always already queer to the normative settler,” and Qwo-Li Driskill explains that “within dominant European worldviews all Cherokees were characterized as gender-nonconforming and sexually deviant.”⁵⁷ What makes Behn’s representation of Semernia so striking, then, is that Semernia is so entirely inside the ideals of white femininity with her focus on honorable behavior and language of a much higher register than that of Ranter, her stage double. Thus, while the play can be read as “part of the work of recovering transhistoricity” and specifically its nonwhite representations, it also reminds us of Snorton’s argument that transness is always already a racialized category.⁵⁸ Semernia’s transgender citizenship equals death, as she best serves the imperial project in her non-being.

Semernia’s death contrasts starkly with the Widow’s happy ending. In many ways, her fate functions as synecdoche for the fate of a whole race caught in the crossfire of empire and the violence of colonization while clearly forming a component of the canon of literature that embraces the “vanishing Indian” trope. The play’s ending suggests that Indigenous people and cross-racial romance must die or be eliminated in order to make room for white settlers. As Margaret Ferguson puts it, “The widow and Daring acquire their license to live at the price of their doubles’ [Semernia and Bacon’s] deaths.”⁵⁹ In many ways, the finale of The Widow Ranter is a foregone conclusion, as earlier moments in the play portray the Indigenous people as mere caricatures. It is impossible to ignore the haunting stage directions to Act IV, Scene I, that describe “a temple, with an Indian god placed upon it … all bow to the idol … the Priest and Priestesses dance about the idol, with ridiculous postures and crying (as for incantations). Thrice repeated, ‘Agah Yerkin, Agah Boah, Sulen Tawarapah, Sulen Tawarapah,’ ” after which, Cavarnio invokes “the god of our Quiocto.”⁶⁰ Suvir Kaul describes these elements of the play as “colonial fantasies [that] are designated to delineate cultural difference, but also … to render imaginable (and thus manageable) faraway places and peoples.”⁶¹ For contemporary readers and scholars, however, these stage directions suggest a deeply uninformed, exoticizing, bigoted view of Indigenous peoples and their culture on the part of the playwright.

Beyond those fantastic and offensive descriptions, Semernia’s cross-dressing does not merely make her the Widow’s “double”; it also eroticizes and exoticizes her as an individual, playing into Restoration era trends of attracting audiences by dressing women performers in men’s clothes, while her Indigenous dress is not historically accurate.⁶² The image of Anne Bracegirdle as Semernia, depicted in an exoticized manner, her light skin a stark contrast to the short, dark-skinned servants or slaves fanning her, represents an image of a sexually available feminine Indigeneity that is still acceptably English and white (see Figure 1.1). This image reminds us that the Indigenous characters in The Widow Ranter would have been played by English actors. The visuals of the play are a mix of stereotyped exotic qualities and barely disguised Englishness. Semernia’s trans embodiment, like the overall portrayal of her indigeneity in the play, reflects imperial desires for consuming Indigenous people rendered exotic.

TRANSNESS AND REPRODUCING EMPIRE

As the titular character of the play, the Widow Ranter’s character and story is central to the play’s construction of meaning. Her ability to cross class boundaries illustrates the possibilities for a new start in the colonies for former citizens of the imperial center, while her transing gender successfully reveals how the play is attuned to the possibilities of imperial romance for those who have majoritarian attributes. In addition to emphasizing the moral characteristics necessary for a successful bi-gender colony, the play also suggests that the Widow, in particular, embodies transgender citizenship through her ability to both fight like a man and give birth to future (white) colonists. Although children do not play a central role in The Widow Ranter, several allusions throughout suggest one of the crucial objects to establishing imperial supremacy: the reproduction of independent, resilient, but governable subject-citizens.

The play posits the colony as a heterotopia, with its subversion of colonial leadership and cast of characters whose status bespeaks a world-upside-down mentality. Colonies often functioned as male homosocial spaces to which women needed to be imported.⁶³ The Widow Ranter, however, presents Virginia as a space inhabited by many single women (or functionally single in the case of Madame Surelove). By the end of the play, these women have been successfully matched to the “excess” men of the cosmopolitan center of the colony, second sons of impoverished upper-class families in England. These romantic relationships have a specific goal: to build the colony’s economic power through successful reproduction, growing the colony’s governing power.

From the beginning, the play establishes the idea that men like Friendly and Hazard will be helping themselves—and the colony—by marrying and siring children. As he urges Hazard to pursue Madame Surelove, Friendly explains, “This country wants nothing but to be peopled with a well-born race to make it one of the best colonies in the world.”⁶⁴ And while his passive construction “to be peopled” obscures the process through which that will happen, his encouragement to Hazard in the very first scene of the play, his emphasis on the good (or acceptable) “breeding” among the available women, and his own focus on the possibility of financial successes in the colony paint a picture that equates reproduction of “appropriate” colonists with personal success not only for himself and his friend but also for the colony and the English empire. His use of the phrase “well-born race” again reminds us of how whiteness is becoming constructed as a racial category. The play ends on a similar note when Chrisante’s father Downright blesses her union with Friendly. He consents to the union but notes to Friendly: “Here, take her young man and with her all my fortune—when I am dead, sirrah—not a groat before—unless to buy ye baby clouts.”⁶⁵ Downright’s refusal to bequeath his money until after his death is softened by the mention of future grandchildren, as the play reminds us at its conclusion that heterosexuality and reproductive futurity are the goal in these pairings.⁶⁶

The deaths of Bacon and Semernia ultimately make way for an overflow of English/white heterosexuality and its consequent reproducibility. Differences of class, fortune, and rank become erased among the settler colonists, as if the play were overcompensating for its homosociality: much of the play revolves around the friendship of Friendly and Hazard, the loyalty of Daring to Bacon, the broken alliance between Bacon and Cavarnio, and the tenuous alliance of the inadequate justices of the peace. Bacon and Semernia die before consummating their love and do not reproduce in the colonies. Notably, Semernia and Cavarnio also do not mention any children in their union—their reproductive lack may be read as a consequence of a lack of sexual desire between them, or as symbolic for what the play anticipates as the impending obliteration of Indigenous societies with the continued waves of settlers. While the play ends in a way that reinforces Mark Rifkin’s notion of “settler common sense,” I argue that the fate of Semernia leaves a ghostly impression over the final scene, inflecting this “common sense” with a bloody pall.⁶⁷ Her transgender performance and that of the Widow cannot be separated at the end of a play in which their stories have run so clearly parallel to one another.

The reproducibility of empire is that performance’s main objective, and once the Indigenous characters are purged, transgender citizenship comes to mean one thing specifically: white settler resilience combined with the ability to reproduce implicitly white, English subject-citizens for the economic benefit of the colonizer. Behn’s vision of trans citizenship ends up, as much of her work likewise models, reproducing British imperialism and whiteness, and whatever possibilities for gender nonnormativity are extended by the play are safely contained by its ending.⁶⁸ The brief moments of trans embodiment highlight how only certain forms of gender crossing are permitted as part of the imperial project: they must be temporary, situated through white bodies, and put into the service of heteronormative familial relations. The homosocial bonding among settler colonists is part of settler colonialism and settler common sense, even as this bonding and heterosexual monogamy are revealed as built on a foundation of queer desires and transgender embodiments.

The transmasculine performances of Ranter and Semernia structure the transgender capacity of The Widow Ranter, as their cross-dressing and melding of binarized gender norms within single characters do indeed create what Getsy suggests is a “site where dimorphic and static understandings of gender are revealed as arbitrary and inadequate.”⁶⁹ Within the colonial heterotopia, the gender binary is revealed as a construct that likewise pushes on the categories of race and nationality. The play exposes a far earlier understanding of transness as a racialized category by giving new meaning to Indigenous transitivity. Transitivity, which Snorton borrows from Claire Colebrook, “is the condition for what becomes known as the human.”⁷⁰ While The Widow Ranter as a work is problematic, and its final erasure of Indigenous characters stereotypical to say the least, it is also true that in giving Semernia a central role, and in giving her speeches the full majesty of tragedy, Behn allows her to articulate the humanity of herself and the other Indigenous characters, however fleetingly. However, it is Semernia’s transing of gender that triggers her death, her removal from the human. The play posits, to paraphrase Snorton, that indigeneity is “a condition of possibility for the modern world” while also “articulat[ing] the paradox of nonbeing.”⁷¹ In this way, as in so many others, Behn’s work holds out the possibility of destabilizing gendered and racial norms before, disappointingly, foreclosing them yet again. It is perhaps this essential contradiction of the play that has made it so popular to read and study, and so impossible to stage.

NOTES

Acknowledgment: I’d like to thank the editors of the collection and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this essay and Emily M. N. Kugler for her assistance in editing. I’d like to thank Emily, Amanda Johnson, and Nicole Garret for feedback on an early version of this essay. I’d also like to thank my research assistant Jennifer Porter for her assistance on this project, as well as the students in Celia Barnes’s fall 2020 drama course at Lawrence University for their thought-provoking questions on transness in this play. Finally, thank you to Margaret Huettl for helping me think through some of the more tangled elements of Indigenous representation in this work.

1. 1. Jonathan Elmer, in writing about the play and Oroonoko, argues that “these texts are tonally hybrid and notoriously ambiguous about their values,” while Srinivas Aravamudan calls Oroonoko “an ironic text,” and I would venture to say the same of The Widow Ranter. Similarly, Adam Beach and Sara Eaton have also noted that the play poses a challenge for readers, as it, like Oroonoko, refuses any single interpretation of its aims or politics. Elmer, On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 23; Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 33; Beach, “Anti-Colonist Discourse, Tragicomedy, and the ‘American’ Behn,” Comparative Drama 38, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2004): 213–233; and Eaton, “ ‘A Well-Born Race’: Aphra Behn’s ‘The Widow Ranter; or The History of Bacon in Virginia’ and the Place of Proximity,” in Indography: Writing the “Indian” in Early Modern England, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 235–248.

2. 2. I turn here to David J. Getsy’s entry on “transgender capacity” in the collection on “Keywords for Transgender Studies”; I discuss my use of this term more fully in the rest of the chapter. See David J. Getsy, “Capacity,” TSQ: Transgender Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (May 2014): 47–49.

3. 3. I use the term “citizen” here purposefully to highlight the coming change from subject to citizen that The Widow Ranter, I argue, is anticipating.

4. 4. Jennifer Frangos argues that The Widow Ranter specifically reveals the “transformative power and queer potential of the early modern Atlantic world,” an argument I also make about the stories of Anne Bonny and Mary Read in my article “Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers on the High Seas” in Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843, ed. Misty Krueger (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2021), 95–113. See Frangos, “The Early Modern Queer Atlantic: Narratives of Sex and Gender on New World Soil,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, ed. Leslie Elizabeth Eckel and Clare Frances Elliott (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 164–175 (163).

5. 5. In this way, Behn’s play anticipates Jasbir Puar’s concept of homonationalism as elaborated in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

6. 6. See, for example, Elliott Visconsi, “A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn’s ‘Oroonoko’ and ‘The Widow Ranter,’ ” English Literary History 69, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 673–701; Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “ ‘The Widow Ranter’ and Royalist Culture in Colonial Virginia,” Early American Literature 39, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 41–66; Melissa Mowry, “ ‘Past Remembrance or History’: Aphra Behn’s ‘The Widdow Ranter,’ or How the Collective Lost Its Honor,” English Literary History 79, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 597–621; and Denys Van Renen, “Reimagining Royalism in Aphra Behn’s America,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 53, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 499–521.

7. 7. See Scarlet Bowen, “Queering the Sexual Impasse in Seventeenth-Century ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’ Poetry,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 19, no. 1 (January 2013): 31–56; Frangos, “The Early Modern Queer Atlantic,” 163–175; Hannah Chaskin, “Masculinity and Narrative Voice in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister,” Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 28, no. 1 (July 2021): 75–89; and Kirsten T. Saxton, “ ‘[T]hat Where One Was, There Was the Other’: Dreams of Queer Stories in Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun, or, the Fair Vow-Breaker (1689),” Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 28, no. 2 (April 2021): 160–176.

8. 8. Saxton, “ ‘[T]hat Where One Was,’ ” 164.

9. 9. Saxton, “ ‘[T]hat Where One Was,’ ” 164.

10. 10. Getsy, “Capacity,” 47–49.

11. 11. Joseph Gamble, “Toward a Trans Philology,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 26–44 (26).

12. 12. Quoted in both Frangos, “The Early Modern Queer Atlantic,” 165, and Kathryn Wichelns, “From ‘The Scarlet Letter’ to Stonewall: Reading the 1629 Thomas(ine) Hall Case, 1978–2009,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 500–523 (501).

13. 13. Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska, “Introduction: The Benefits of Being Trans Historical,” in Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, ed. Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), 1–24 (5).

14. 14. See, for example, Susan Stryker, “Foreword,” in TransGothic in Literature in Culture, ed. Jolene Zigarovich (New York: Routledge, 2018), xi–xvii.

15. 15. “citizen, n. and adj.,” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2022). For more discussion on the uses of “subject” vs “citizen” in the seventeenth century, see Luc Borot, “Subject and Citizen: The Ambiguities of the Political Self in Early Modern England,” Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique 21, no. 1 (July 2016): 1–15.

16. 16. Borot, “Subject and Citizen,” 1–2.

17. 17. In “ ‘Past Remembrance or History,’ ” Mowry argues convincingly that Behn would have been aware of Leveller ideologies and, further, that her thoughts on sovereignty were “so nuanced and profound, it suggests a substantive intellectual engagement with mid-century radicalism” (600).

18. 18. Stephanie Degooyer, Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 40–41.

19. 19. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 268. All references to The Widow Ranter; or, the History of Bacon in Virginia are from Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 249–327. All references to the play will be referenced by page number, rather than act or line number. I use the modernized spellings as per this edition.

20. 20. Mowry, “ ‘Past Remembrance or History,’ ” 614.

21. 21. I discuss my use of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia more fully in subsequent paragraphs.

22. 22. As elaborated by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), biopower is a theory that makes visible how political power and knowledge structures turn to biological life as a site of control, governance, and surveillance. As European nations shifted from monarchical forms of governance to increasingly complex bureaucratic institutions, attempts to control biological life became invested in educational, medical, and policing systems. Biopolitics, moreover, is a term Foucault utilizes to describe how these systemic shifts seep into and penetrate everyday life (120).

23. 23. Ula Lukszo Klein, Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth Century British Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021), 10–13.

24. 24. In “ ‘[T]hat Where One Was,’ ” Saxton identifies “queer doubling” in Behn’s History of the Nun, writing, “These doublings work structurally with other formal effects to queer gender itself, revealing the limits of hetero- cisgendered categories” (164). I extend Saxton to consider trans doubling in the Widow and Semernia’s cross-dressing.

25. 25. Edith Snook, “English Women’s Writing and Indigenous Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Phillippy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 382–397 (386).

26. 26. Rebecca M. Lush, “The Royal Frontier: Colonist and Native Relations in Aphra Behn’s Virginia,” in Before the West Was West: Critical Essays on Pre 1800 Literature of the American Frontiers, ed. Amy T. Hamilton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 130–160.

27. 27. Trans persons of color, particularly Black trans women, are today at the highest risk of violent death in the United States of all trans and nonbinary people. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “It is clear that fatal violence disproportionately affects transgender women of color—particularly Black transgender women.” See “Fatal Violence against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2022,” Human Rights Campaign, accessed July 28, 2023, https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-violence-against-the-transgender-and-gender-expansive-community-in-2022. Additionally, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement has brought attention to the crisis of violence facing Indigenous women both in North America and around the globe.

28. 28. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 8; and Jodi A. Byrd, “What’s Normative Got to Do with It?: Toward Indigenous Queer Relationality,” Social Text 38, issue 4, no. 145 (December 2020): 105–123 (106).

29. 29. Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 269.

30. 30. Dawn Morgan, “Indigenous Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century Literature,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 2 (Winter 2021): 209–219 (214).

31. 31. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22–27.

32. 32. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24.

33. 33. Byrd, “What’s Normative Got to Do with It?,” 105.

34. 34. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 27.

35. 35. For more information about Nathaniel Bacon and his political views, see Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), especially chapters 2 and 3. For an in-depth history of the rebellion, see James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

36. 36. For information about Bacon’s Rebellion and the Indigenous groups involved, see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 159.

37. 37. Behn, Widow Ranter, 317. Heidi Hutner has read this exchange as channeling the myth of Matoaka. See Heidi Hutner, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 90–91.

38. 38. Hutner, Colonial Women, 99. For more on Cockacoeske, see Martha W. McCartney, “Cockacoeske, Queen of Pamunkey: Diplomat and Suzeraine,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, rev. and ex. ed., eds. Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 245–249. Willow White (Métis Nation of Alberta) also gave a presentation on teaching Cockacoeske, Behn’s Widow Ranter, and Bacon’s Rebellion at the ASECS 2022 annual meeting (Pedagogy Roundtable: The Indigenous Eighteenth Century, Baltimore, MD, April 1, 2022).

39. 39. Felicity Nussbaum discusses the popularity of breeches roles on the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage. See Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 195.

40. 40. For how the Widow’s personality reflects English ideas about the Ranters, a religious minority, see Mowry, “ ‘Past Remembrance or History,’ ” 606.

41. 41. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 265.

42. 42. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 265.

43. 43. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 268.

44. 44. See Scarlet Bowen, “ ‘The Real Soul of a Man in Her Breast: Popular Opposition and British Nationalism in Memoirs of Female Soldiers, 1740–1750,’ ” Eighteenth-Century Life 28, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 20–45.

45. 45. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 310.

46. 46. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 323.

47. 47. Joanne Barker, “Introduction: Critically Sovereign,” in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–44 (7).

48. 48. Barker, “Introduction: Critically Sovereign.”

49. 49. Robbie Richardson, The Savage and the Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 143. See also Unca Eliza Winkfield, The Female American, 2nd ed., ed. Michelle Burnham (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2014).

50. 50. Lush, “The Royal Frontier,” 131.

51. 51. Semernia’s cross-dressing may reflect aspects of Powhatan performances of gender and social role. Anthropologist Margaret Holmes Williamson argues that the Powhatan considered some persons “both male and female” in their navigation of social norms. Individuals assigned male at birth, for instance, might display behaviors or appearances more typical of women (such as engaging in agricultural labor or leaving long hair on the left side of the head while the other side remained shaved, typical for men). “This ambiguity of gender,” she argues, “corresponds exactly to ambiguity of status; this is, a man’s gender … was contingent on the social context in which he found himself. As a husband, he was male; as a subject, he was female to his chief’s masculinity” (220). See Williamson, Powhatan Lords of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).

52. 52. Lush, “The Royal Frontier,” 131.

53. 53. Lush, “The Royal Frontier,” 131.

54. 54. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 317–318.

55. 55. Sydnee Wagner, “Racing Gender to the Edge of the World: Decoding the Transmasculine Amazon Cannibal in Early Modern Travel Writing,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 137–155 (137).

56. 56. Wagner, “Racing Gender to the Edge of the World,” 138.

57. 57. Byrd, “What’s Normative Got to Do with It,” 105; and Qwo-Li Driskill, Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 41.

58. 58. Wagner, “Racing Gender,” 137.

59. 59. Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 354.

60. 60. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 299. Janet Todd discusses the difficulty of editing a text like The Widow Ranter by drawing attention to this reference to Quiocto and the challenge in knowing whether Behn knew of the Quiocto people and how consciously or not she was making that reference. See Janet Todd, “ ‘Pursue that Way of Fooling, and Be Damn’d’: Editing Aphra Behn,” Studies in the Novel 27, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 304–319 (312).

61. 61. Suvir Kaul, Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 54.

62. 62. I discuss this trend in some detail in Chapter 4 of Sapphic Crossings, 145–148.

63. 63. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, 2015), 3.

64. 64. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 256.

65. 65. Behn, The Widow Ranter, 322.

66. 66. This ending, with its overflow of heterosexual unions, should put readers in mind of similar endings, such as in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night where the sheer numbers of couplings overwhelm but do not completely suppress the prior queerness of desires expressed in the action of the play.

67. 67. Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xvi.

68. 68. Again, as in Twelfth Night, or even, much later, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, the heterosexual couplings at the ending cannot quite erase the queer desires and trans embodiments in the rest of the text—desires and embodiments that ultimately provide the foundation for heterosexual union.

69. 69. Getsy, “Capacity,” 48.

70. 70. Quoted in Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 5.

71. 71. Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 5.