Unsexing Eden

Abstract

ABSTRACT Most scholarship on Milton’s Paradise Lost takes Eve and Adam’s sex and gender difference for granted. While critics highlight the queer potentialities of Miltonic matter, they often focus on the epic’s angels and overlook Eve and Adam’s corporeal, yet still vital, materiality. This article turns its attention to the queer and trans possibilities in the first created humans. Bringing together accounts of queer Miltonian metaphysics, feminist psychoanalysis, and trans quantum materialism, I argue that while prelapsarian Eve and Adam have a real subjective difference, this difference is not an a priori sexed or gendered one, nor is it ontological. I offer a transpsychoanalytic reading of Eve and Adam’s unfallen subjectivities, which are structured without an originary loss, and explicate their difference while illustrating how unfallen Eden is a place without cis, binary sex and gender as we know it.