Skin becoming Scaly:’ Fishwives, Transness, and Unnatural History

This talk will look to the intersections of sex and species, fish and flesh, in eighteenth and nineteenth discussions surrounding fishwives. Fishwives – women who sold fish in urban and coastal environments across Britain, and crucially, occupied a category outside the confines of sex, gender, or species – abound in print and popular culture, including broadside ballads, graphic satire, and ethnographic travel writing. This abundance coincides with the surge interest in natural history and the drive for classification systems to explain, order, and contain the natural world. Contemporaries, including naturalists, constructed identities for women based on taxonomies gleaned from the annals of natural history. They looked to aquatic animals – fish, coral, barnacles, oysters, and the like – to make sense of the perceived sex and gender ambiguity of these women. In doing so, fishwives challenged their contemporaries to think and articulate identities and phenomena using a trans analytical framework, in a period well before trans was recognized as a field of inquiry or a category of identity.