I’m Caitlin Hartweave and this is my personal website. I am a PhD candidate at George Mason University studying American history, with a focus on gender and gender-non-conformity in the 18th century Atlantic world.
As a historian, I dedicate my research to broadening and diversifying our understanding of gender in the past. My dissertation, “‘An Incomprehensible Existence:’ The Chevalière d’Eon and Trans Narratives in the Early Atlantic World,” investigates the recurring language and narrative themes gender-non-conforming individuals in the eighteenth century British and French empires used to define themselves and their genders. Using the Chevalière d’Eon as a focal point alongside comparative cases, I argue that these narrative commonalities were not merely coincidental but rather came together to form a cultural vocabulary of gender-non-conformity.
In other words, I like digging up queerness in the past, both through spotlighting trans and gender-non-conforming people in history and by investigating how gender operated in the early Atlantic world. My hope is to recover and share the amazing stories of oft-ignored or -forgotten queer people as well as contribute to the LGBT+ community’s history beyond Stonewall. By questioning how gender operated throughout history, we can have a better understanding of both our past and our present.
I currently work as a Thesis and Dissertation Consultant at the George Mason University Writing Center, helping graduate students in all disciplines with their writing. In my free time, I am also the long-time host of two comic book clubs, Ladies Night and LGBT+ Night, hosted online by Victory Comics in Falls Church, Virginia. As the names imply, these book clubs highlight comics about women and LGBT+ people as well as female and queer comic creators. If you can’t find me in the archives or the comic shop, you’ll find me with my cats or at my sewing machine.