M.A. Miller

“Gender Unconformities” uncovers how the British empire’s extractive industries not only powered economies but also remade gender itself. Chalk, coal, iron, and tin reclassified bodies through dust, pigment, and injury, governing gender variance through labor and matter long before it was named as an identity. In doing so, the book reframes trans history as a formation shaped by deep time, extraction, and imperial infrastructure. Moving from Charlotte Smith’s cliffs to Edith Ellis’s miners, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff to Shah Husain the stained saint and child of a weaver, the book spans archives and centuries to develop “trans geohistoriography”—a method that treats earth as history and residue as record. Ultimately, trans embodiment registers as a product of heterogeneous pressures—geological, environmental, juridical, and racial—rather than as a modern identity category.