Chapter 15 - What a Doctor Should Look Like

Summary

The queer femme disrupts the legibility of queerness and politics since the feminine is scapegoated for its subjugation as false and inferior. This essay explores the cultural genealogy of queer femme invisibility by reading white women physician characters in late nineteenth-century New Woman novels in relation to the science of sexology and feminist dress reform as contrapuntal forces that informed the viability of gender expression. Henry James’s The Bostonians, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay, Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor, and William Dean Howells’s Dr. Breen’s Practice present variations on the cultural dichotomy between femme and science framed by the marriage plot. Through the politics of dress the possibility of the queer femme is both acknowledged and erased as a legitimate expression and valid identity. These novels trace an incipient femme sensibility bound to whiteness that disrupts assumptions about the coherence of representation required for viability of minoritarian gender identities.