A declaration of intention
I write with my body oriented forward, in a state of longing, engaging directly with the potential of something which has not yet been realised. These words form part of an embodied enquiry that sits deep inside of me. Refracted through my own experiences of gender and sexuality, and the words, work, labour and love of all the people who are around me, have come before me, will come after.
I speak from a feminist position which is wholly and unwaveringly trans-inclusive. Recently, feminist discourse has been weaponised against trans people but feminism, in its very nature, has always sought to disrupt rigid definitions of gender, consistently challenging the idea that ‘woman’, and by extension ‘man’, are natural or fixed categories. Instead, it positions them as socially constructed and politically charged, shaped by the dominance of a patriarchal society.
I speak from a position of friction. I speak as much from love as I do from rage and I believe and hope that violence can build in more ways than it can tear down. I hope this writing can help to envision or provoke an alternative way of seeing, by not only challenging the rhetoric around what constitutes a woman, what constitutes a man, but also, what constitutes a body.
Prologue
Historically, flesh has been defined biologically, but technologies have birthed new bodies, bodies which sit outside natural systems rendered in pixels. These are not bodies of inheritance, but of intention. Unbound by the constraints of the physical, they invite us to cross a threshold and imagine the self otherwise. Offering us forms not given, but chosen, surfaces to shape, blur, and smudge. As they emerge, these bodies mark a shift not only in how we represent ourselves, but in how we experience time, memory, and identity, inviting us to trace new trajectories across the histories and futures they intersect.
Our experience of time is that it moves forwards but the residue left by history allows us to have a material experience of the past. We can flatten time through research and practice, tying knots between events of the past, present and potential futures. Gazing upon individuals who have made their own crossings, transgressions of the body oriented towards alternative horizons, carving out spaces of resistance and reinvention at the margins. By tracing these histories, we can begin to uncover the roots of the violent rhetoric that continues to shape the present, forging paths forward across virtual boundaries where untethered bodies might roam free.
The Buggery Act
In finding an entry point, we reorient our perspective back nearly 500 years, following the echo of state rhetoric which has consistently sought to control bodily autonomy and sexuality. In 1533, under the reign of Henry VIII, the Parliament of England passed The Buggery Act, which, for the first time, made anal intercourse between two parties punishable as a capital offence. While such acts had been condemned for centuries by religion, the British Parliament’s decision to make a canon law civil set forth a precedent for state sanctioned marginalisation. This shift not only fortified sexual persecution within Britain but, carried by the British Empire’s violent and rampant acts of colonisation, also saw these legal frameworks codified into the laws of its colonies, reinforcing structures of criminalisation far beyond Britain’s borders.
Yet there is a sort of tragic paradox, in that it was the establishment of the Buggery Act and its proliferation which, in-part, gave birth to modern conceptions of sexual identity in the west. In Feminism is Queer Mimi Marinucci (2010) argues that categories of identity determine and are determined by how people understand themselves and are understood by others. These categories are often binary, established by the contrast between the dominant group and those excluded from it. In terms of sexual orientation, the dominant group is defined by the distinction between normal and abnormal sexuality, coupled with the accusation that specific forms of sexual identity are deviant. So while it wasn’t until the late 19th century that the terms 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' became common use, through this lens, we can understand that establishing such a law in Britain gave birth to a framework for homosexual identity, and in turn, heterosexual identity, by defining anal intercourse as sexually deviant and vaginal intercourse as not.
The Mollies
In the centuries following the Act’s establishment, the threat of execution forced homosexuals to gather in secret. Over time, this enforced secrecy gave rise to a rudimentary queer subculture that flourished in 18th-century London, giving birth to spaces known as Molly Houses, which for some time existed outside the purview of law and religion. The people who frequented these spaces referred to themselves as Mollies, which, because there was no other term except the Biblical or legal ‘sodomite’ or ‘bugger’, became a positive form of colloquial self-identification.
At the time, British society accorded high importance to the union of marriage and so the gendered roles that men and women played took on a rigid form. Molly houses became spaces where these roles could be satirised or even critiqued. Some popular activities of the time included cross-dressing, marriage, and mock-birth rituals, with many houses containing spaces known as ‘chapels’; rooms in which patrons could ‘marry’, while other patrons celebrated their ‘union’. Mollies would dress up and perform in these ceremonies together, following which two Mollies might be defined as husbands.
The camp performance of the feminine was a regular feature of house gatherings. In his detailed investigation of 18th-century homosexual England, Rictor Norton (2006) uncovers the writing of investigative journalist Edward Ward, who, in one scathing reflection describes the mollies, after infiltrating one of the houses, as “gangs of sodomitical wretches” who were “so far degenerated from all masculine Deportment, or manly Exercises, that they rather fancy themselves Women, imitating all the little Vanities that Custom has reconciled to the Female Sex.” Here, in this vicious tirade, we read the Mollies cast as other, framed as a threat to the moral fabric of society, engaging in a crossing of the threshold between masculine and feminine.
But this transgression, which was becoming more and more visible, did not go unpunished. While some Molly houses operated in secrecy, they remained vulnerable to surveillance and moral policing. One of the most notorious examples being the 1726 raid on a house in Holborn, run by Margaret Clap, known affectionately as Mother Clap. Her house was targeted after it was covertly infiltrated by police and society members leading to numerous arrests, trials, and executions. Clap herself was sentenced to death, a stark illustration of how far the state would go to suppress gender and sexual expression.
While in the eyes of the state the Molly Houses represented a direct affront to gender and sexual order, from our vantage point we can understand that these spaces were more than just sites of pleasure. Their performance of heterosexual institutions, not only subverted norms but exposed their artificiality. The Mollies themselves became avatars of possibility by defying rigid gender roles and societal expectations of what masculinity should be. In their crossings, they created space for alternative expressions of identity and desire, embodying a radical potential for living otherwise within a repressive society. Though their individual identities have largely been lost, their collective image endures as a symbol of resistance and queer futurity.
Sapphic Crossings
The violence and discrimination which the Mollies were subjected to highlights the ways in which sexuality and the preservation of patriarchal moral order in the 17th and 18th centuries was shaped by religion, the state, and the rhetoric and enforcement of the acts which criminalised homosexuality. However, for as much violence that the Mollies were subject to, it's important to acknowledge that the houses only existed, in-part, because of the privileges that were afforded to men in society at this time. Men could move more freely through public space, they could organise in private, navigating legal boundaries in ways women could not. This relative freedom enabled the formation of such subcultures, even under threat of persecution.
In contrast, female same-sex desire occupied a more liminal space. The legal repression and cultural visibility of same-sex acts between women during this period was markedly different. Lesbianism was never explicitly outlawed within Britain, not because it was accepted, but because it was rendered invisible within dominant patriarchal and religious frameworks. Judith Halberstam (1998) talks about how female same-sex desire often fell outside the scope of legal or moral scrutiny, in part because women’s sexuality was typically understood only in relation to men. So if or when such acts were acknowledged, they were often pathologised or exoticised rather than criminalised, reinforcing the idea that female sexuality existed only to serve male pleasure or reproduction. This absence of legal recognition did not imply tolerance, but rather a refusal to grant lesbian desire the cultural coherence necessary for identity formation in the same way that male homosexual identity began to take shape.
It is within this erasure, or obfuscation, however, that we find a unique history and lineage of lesbian identity within Britain. One which could be framed as even more radical and transgressive than that of the Mollies. Individuals whose stories speak not only to the ways that queer people have always resisted the rigid systems imposed upon us, but to how we can author our bodies and identities as conscious acts of orientation.
Many accounts of lesbian relationships in this time involve what Lukzo Klein (2021) refers to as Sapphic Crossings, instances in which women would take on the role of men in society to obscure their identity. These were not simply performances, or disguises, but strategic embodiments, transgressions composed through clothing, voice, name, and posture. We can position these transgressions as early avatars. Prototypes of self-authorship, constructed to pass through a world that offered little space for deviation. These historical crossings, though grounded in the social contexts of their time, open up a way of thinking about what it means to construct a body, one that might not align with what is biologically assigned, but instead with what is emotionally, relationally, and politically needed.
Crossing 1: James How
Located again in London, in the early 18th century, sixteen year old Mary East, had fallen in love with another woman. Eventually, to maintain their relationship in a society that did not legally or socially acknowledge their bond, the couple made a decision, they would live as husband and wife. Mary would become James, adopting a male persona in public life. Together, they ran taverns in a few locations across the city, presenting to the world as a married couple. And for more than thirty years, they lived this way, not in isolation, but among neighbours and patrons, forming a network of local relationships.
Their story is often concluded through the lens of a legal scandal, during which an old acquaintance attempted to blackmail them, which, after some 30 years, exposed James' hidden identity. Public scrutiny and subsequent court proceedings forced James to exist as Mary again and subsequently retreat from public life. But to centre this moment only is to miss the more radical fact, that for 30 years, James How lived as a respected member of his community. It can be easily argued that this life, so thoroughly constructed and maintained, was not a disguise, but an avatar of necessity, a body rendered through action. An avatar, not in the digital sense, but in the very meaning of the word; an embodiment of the self in another form.
There is something deeply poetic about the ordinariness of the life which they sought to build together. James How was not a political revolutionary, or a famous artist or writer. He ran pubs, he was a part of the everyday fabric of his community. And in that, he embodied a kind of quiet radicalism, a crossing in motion for 30 years. Finding form in an existence of the mundane. To speak of James How in this way, is to acknowledge the risk and courage required to inhabit a social role that sits outside what has been prescribed to you, especially at this time. It is to understand identity not as something fixed or revealed, but as something fluid and continually negotiated through gesture, and the slow accumulation of time.
Crossing 2: Charlotte Charke
If James How embodied a sustained, assimilated identity performed across time, then Charlotte Charke presents a much more unruly figure. A body that refused to resolve itself.
Born in 1713, Charlotte grew up submerged in London’s theatrical world, and it was on the stage that she began to cross the thresholds of gender. She was known for playing breeches roles, male characters performed by female actors, which were popular in theatre at the time. But unlike her peers, Charlotte didn’t step back into her assigned gender when the curtain fell. Instead, she kept walking through the world as a man. She lived much of her adult life in masculine dress and worked under a series of male aliases. At one point, she joined a touring theatre company, travelling under the name Mr. Charles Brown.
In her autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755), she writes about the friction she experienced in trying to exist so unruly. She recounts a moment that she sought to hide her feminine identity from a woman who was romantically interested in her:
“Not making the least Discovery of my Sex by my Behaviour, ever endeavouring to keep up to the well-bred Gentlemen, I became … the unhappy Object of Love in a young Lady … had it been possible for me to have been what she designed me, nothing less than her Husband.”
Her memoir recounts numerous occasions where she was taken for a man, and where she chose not to correct it. She writes about romantic entanglements, about being read in multiple ways across multiple contexts. Her accounts are filled with moments of tension, between visibility and danger, freedom and exposure. Her identity in perpetual crossing.
What makes Charke such a compelling figure in this series of crossings is that she didn’t seem particularly interested in passing as a man in order to blend in. She wasn’t hiding but exposing the edges, showing just how easily gender could be undone, recontextualised differently from one day to the next. In a sense, she was always in character, but that character was a refusal, a destabilisation, a glitch. By not confining her performance to the stage she revealed that gender itself was always, already, a kind of performance.
In Charlotte, we see an early articulation of what we might call genderfuck, a kind of transgression that didn’t resolve into a neat identity but revelles in its instability. If James built a quiet, assimilated avatar, Charlotte’s was in constant motion, flickering between forms and resisting capture. Her life found its meaning in the act of refusing containment, in choosing fluidity in a time period that demanded rigidity. She leaves behind a hypothesis of multiple avatars, each not a polished projection but a series of experiments, an improvisation of gender. Her identity was a proposition of the body as spectacle, as critique, a self that slips between postures, never fully legible.
Crossing 3: Gluck
Propelled forwards now, into the 20th century, toward a figure whose trace remains more solid than that of James or Charlotte. Gluck was born in 1895 to a wealthy family of catering magnates. They would go on to live entirely on their own terms, not only through their work, but through the deliberate construction of their name, appearance, and steadfast refusal to be categorised. Eventually, shedding their birth name, deciding to be known only as Gluck; no prefix, no suffix, no quotation marks, no pronouns, only Gluck.
From early adulthood, Gluck wore typical men’s clothing, cropped their hair short, living as an artist with relative profile. Gluck’s life was not a performance in the way Charlotte was, or constructed as a means of assimilation like James’. They didn’t leave behind a residue filled with ambiguity. Instead, Gluck chose to erase any invitation to question their identity. Carving out a space wholly and simply their own.
Gluck’s paintings included still lifes and portraits, both of themselves and others. They are stark and direct, delicate and precise. What makes Gluck particularly resonant is the way they crafted identity through their images. Gluck used the medium of painting, of an image constructed with the frame, as a manifesto for the body. Their work is an articulation of identity and the world around them as visual, to be enjoyed and understood without the conscription of language.
crossings
Queer and trans people have long reshaped their identities as a means of assimilation and survival. Now, digital spaces create new thresholds for embodiment, where virtual bodies rendered in pixels and shaders offer strategies for resistance and self-determination.
Crossings, initially delivered as a lecture at the Institute of Post-Natural Studies in Madrid, explores the parallels between historical acts of gender-crossing and the potential of digital spaces for identity construction. It asks how the design of virtual bodies might emancipate us from the limitations of the physical, and what role they can play in resisting dominant narratives of gender and sexuality. Could we imagine futures where virtual embodiment is not merely a form of escape, but a radical act of self-authorship?
Gluck’s relationship with gender and sexuality was complex but never hidden. They lived openly with women, most notably with Nesta Obermer, who inspired one of Gluck’s most famous paintings, Medallion, a dual portrait of two faces pressed close together, emerging from shadow as one form. Described as a “marriage portrait”, despite the fact their union was not legally recognised, through Gluck’s work their bond was painted, preserved, and archived just the same.
I do not propose that we understand Gluck's existence as a kind of avatar, in the same way that we can understand James or Charlotte’s. However, I believe that in the figures in their paintings we can discover a series of rendered bodies which enable us to think about the ways in which selfhood can be formed through images. Where James How constructed a masculine body as means for assimilation and survival, and Charlotte Charke exposed the instability of gender through performance, Gluck rendered something precise: static images of queer bodies in a world that still lacked language for them. Gluck’s work created an opportunity for crossing inside the frame, crafting a container for identities which simply sought to exist.
Gluck’s endeavour, to render the queer body solid, has been echoed by so many who have followed. From other early 20th century artists such as Henry Scott Tuke, known for his luminous depictions of young men, charged with palpable pleasure and sexuality. All the way through to contemporary artists such as Sin Wai Kin, who uses the frame of the screen to speculate on the means of having a body, their images propositions of what we could become. Oriented from this position, gazing upon the work of Gluck, Tuke, and Wai Kin, and the lives of Charlotte, James and the Mollies, we can start to envision a network of individuals working in tandem across time. By tying knots between these people and practices, we trace how each contributes, through the slow accumulation of their residue on history, to what we now orient ourselves toward: an opportunity to transgress, to cross toward a body untethered, unbound, transformed.
Until the advent of digital technologies, transgressing the body was confined by the limitations of the physical: the flesh, the frame, the materials at our disposal. Technologies introduced a new site of possibility, a space where the body could be rendered rather than inherited. The very promise of the avatar lies in its potential to offer a body over which we have more agency than our physical form, a surface we can shape to express or to conceal. These bodies emerge not merely as surrogate selves, but as thresholds, speculative bodies authored across screens, interfaces, and the queer imagination.
The Avatar
It feels important to acknowledge that everything discussed up to this point has happened. Each individual, each event, has left a residue on history for us to interpret. But from here on, I float entirely in a world of speculation, attempting to cross the threshold toward a point beyond this time, toward an unfixed horizon. One of the primary operations of queerness is to imagine elsewhere, to envision what could be otherwise, even if that otherwise is never reached, because the horizon we long for keeps receding, because there will always be somewhere queerer.
In research on digital embodiment Alison Lanier (2022) states:
"The rendered body is a fantasy. Between the player and the avatar is a gulf of unbeing that the player’s intuition leaps across with seemingly automatic ease."
So to begin again, I orient myself here, acknowledging that the promise of the digital avatar is not about replication, but the offering of a speculative structure, a threshold through which the self might stretch beyond the limits of the physical. The avatar is not a mirror, but a bridge. It is both an extension and a divergence, not unlike the historical crossings we have traced: The Mollies collective joy, James How’s quiet assimilation, Charlotte Charke’s performative disruption, Gluck’s solid image. Their proto-avatars, along with the countless other histories that we have barely had the chance to touch upon inform the logic which drives the desire for queering digital embodiment.
In line with the rhetoric on trans rights within Britain, as well as the repetitive violence that LGBTQ+ people are subject to globally, Alison describes how to be queer or trans at this moment in time means your body becomes a contested site for debate, conflict, legislation and unwanted public definitions. The queer and trans body is politicised without invitation. Disembodied from their basic rights, queer and trans people become coordinates for state sanctioned violence.
Thus the virtual, the avatar, becomes a means of escape, a crossing, another mode of transgression. The promise of the rendered body, is inherently queer, because it is endlessly fluid, it resists any need for a fixed state. As Lanier writes, "queerness and video games share a common ethos: the longing to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance." That longing is embedded in the process of building virtual worlds, in character design, in avatar creation, or imagining somewhere else that we might exist, even just for a few hours. And that desire, that longing for elsewhere, is inherent to queerness.
n seeking to give poetic charge to this concept of queer futurity José Esteban Muñoz (2009), speaks about longing for another world. He states:
“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain”.
Through his lens we can understand this idea of the avatar as a crossing. The rendered body acts as a vessel which might carry us towards a horizon we haven’t yet reached, or potentially ever will. Because if it remains true that queer and trans bodies are subject to violence, if they are as Alison describes “hostage to obeying and reinforcing the existing societal discourse” around gender and sexuality, then all the more reason to allow the digital to become a testing ground for transgressing the body beyond what is forced to be.
The potential of digital embodiment is not that it negates the consequences of the physical, but that it allows for the rehearsal, performance, or tentative inhabiting of another state. The avatar might become a space to explore what we cannot safely inhabit elsewhere. In virtual space, we can orient ourselves how we fit, redirecting our bodies towards the horizon that José so poetically longs for.
While we haven’t yet reached the radical possibility of a queer future in digital space, we are at a moment where we can begin to envision what it might look like. We have conjured simulations of alternative forms of sight and sound, but imagine what becomes possible when we cross the threshold into rendering new modes of touch, taste, and smell. These sensory expansions hold radical potential, yet technological innovation alone is not enough. Even as queer characters appear more frequently in mainstream video games, and gender-diverse options in avatar design are slowly becoming more common, such gestures can’t remain the limited extent of most developers' imaginations.
Still, it's evident something stirs. Digitally rendered bodies, Lanier reminds us, “are spaces of pure possibility”. Arguing that it's important we look beyond convention as the limitations of the virtual body are practically nonexistent. In designing avatars, we can become anything. We can become human, or alien, body or machine, material or immaterial, “what a digitally rendered ‘body’ can be is as diverse as the narratives and worlds dreamed up for them to inhabit.”
As virtual spaces and immersive digital platforms grow to become commonplace, questions of embodiment and inclusion will only become more urgent. “The best that anyone can do,” Lanier concludes, “is to carry a spirit of possibility forward with us into new virtual worlds and to the bodies dreamed up to populate them. Such dreaming can only drive virtual worlds toward a radical horizon… Such dreaming propels the arc of imagined worlds and virtual bodies towards ever-greater flexibility and inclusivity, greater potentiality for worlds that reflect the exciting, messy, fantastic complexity of the world off-screen.”
Epilogue: Letters of longing
My longing to reach this horizon, where I might find a version of myself disembodied from the limitations of the physical, manifested as a body without limits, a body which ripples at the threshold, has only grown over time. I have thought of ways I might throw a rope across this threshold, tethering myself to an unknown rendering of my body in the future. Wondering how I might send a signal forwards, how I might make contact. In the days spent researching this endeavour, I found myself digging through archives, propelled back again, reoriented in the late 19th century, glancing upon the love story of Edmund Gosse, a Victorian literary critic and poet, and sculptor Hamo Thornycroft, who, constrained by the circumstances of their time, shared in my unrequited longing for a body they could not hold. In their case, each other.
Though Gosse was married he maintained a long standing intimate relationship with Thornycroft. Their correspondence, often coded and restrained, reveals a longing for a love that, like many queer figures, was required to exist in the margin, carefully veiled so as not to be caught. In a particularly poetic letter from 1879 Gosse writes to Thornycroft stating:
“My dear Hamo, –
Were you not rather tired on Saturday? I ached in every bone, and lay in bed till 12 next day. After getting off my skates, I came and stood above you at the head of the lake. It was too dark for me to distinguish any one but you: I stayed there watching you talking and meditatively pirouetting on the ice till I made up my mind to go. I hope you saw the splendid bar of crimson in the west, behind the trees.”
Gosse asking Thornycroft whether he had seen the splendid bar of crimson in the west, conjures an image of the burning horizon breaking through the trees. In it, we hear distant echoes of José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer futurity; the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. For both of them, the horizon is more than a romantic image, it becomes a shared point of longing, a way to imagine a future, even if it remains out of reach.
Gosse’s letter becomes an object of their love, a rope cast outwards so that he might tether himself to his lover. Albeit in secret. His letter is in many ways a kind of projection, extending itself across space and time. It holds fragments of their bodies, emotions, and intentions. Letters like this, projections of a queer future not realised, act as documents of desire, of a longing for a life imagined elsewhere, of love hidden in the margins.
Digging for further projections, I uncovered a letter from Gluck to her lover Nesta, in which she declared, “my divine sweetheart, my love, my life. I felt so much I could hardly be said to feel at all - almost numb and yet every nerve ready to jump into sudden life… I love you with all my being now and forever.” Then, a letter from poet Thomas Gray to Charles Victor de Bonstetten in 1770 in which he describes how “I wake at midnight and think of you. I walk in the woods and your image rises beside me.” And another, a letter from Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas: “Write me a line and take all my love - now and forever. Always, and with devotion - but I have no words for how I love you.”
And so I found my rope to cross the threshold, in the shape of words in a frame. An address to a body, a vessel which gives feelings direction through time, closing the gap between two figures. So, to narrate the future I long for, where embodiment might be rendered rather than birthed, I gesture toward the horizon, writing to my avatar, in a future not yet realised and maybe never found:
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