Playing the Breeches Part: Feminist Appropriations, Biographical Fictions and Colonial Contexts in Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry (1999)

This chapter examines a fictional reconstruction of the life of the Irish-born and Scottish-educated colonial military surgeon James Miranda Barry (c. 1799–1865), whose memory has been irrevocably shaped by reports that he was discovered after death to be female bodied. It argues that the feminist narrative of strategic gender crossing which characterises most versions of Barry’s life emerges in displaced form in the novel; in this way, Barry’s transgender (or intersex) identity serves as a vehicle through which women can express agency and pursue ambition in vicarious fashion. Barry’s career took place in the theatre of empire but the racial politics of this era of British history are often overlooked in both biographical and fictional accounts of Barry’s life; close attention to the treatment of colonial contexts will serve to demonstrate the role of white privilege and the construction of racial ‘others’ in these narratives.