Feeling Snaky: Fantasms and the Object of Desire in Keats’s 1820 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes

Abstract: “Lamia” is arguably the key to Keats’s treatment of female desire in the 1820 volume. Reading Lamia as a transspecies transwoman allows for an interpretation of her monstrosity as Keats’s treatment of women’s jouissance, a phenomenon that is both anxiety-producing for men, and a resistant epistemology for women. She is monstrous only in Apollonius’s gaze; to all others her trans skin is entirely beautiful, her passing successful, her monstering self-authorizing.