I was a bit worried that Klein's book was going to be more on the naval-gazing lit-crit side of things, but I ended up enjoying it a lot (even though I did quite a bit of skimming). While Klein does spend a lot of focus on issues of literary genre (even when discussing historic individuals), I think that -- like the way I frame the focus of the LHMP -- it can help in navigating between questions of historic context and personal identity. This book is examining the way historic texts present and discuss "women dressing/disguised as men" because that's how those texts and their authors (for the most part) viewed their subject. When we're examining how Henry Fielding depicted Mary Hamilton in his fictionalized account The Female Husband, we aren't dealing with a man who had a nuanced modern concept of transgender identity that could be explored and interrogated. Nor--at that remove--are we dealing with how the historic Mary Hamilton may have experienced and understood their own gender and sexuality. (Even Fielding wasn't particularly interested in that question.)
For an entirely different approach to some of the same historic content, stay tuned for the next publication in my current gender-crossing mini-series.
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