“Humanity knows not of Sex”: William Blake’s Trans Futurity

Abstract: This essay proposes the trans potential of William Blake’s composite art, focusing on his visuality of text and bodies in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion . Blake’s bodies do not fit into human-made systems of classification. He disorients life/death, human/animal, human/spirit, and male/female divisions through fluid representations of gender and corporeality. In the Marriage , Blake shifts between roman and cursive handwriting to signify transition. In Jerusalem , he imagines a non-exclusionary future where everyone is assured freedom and toleration, regardless of class, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, or species.