#ann heilmann

“Barry’s middle name is equally volatile. Borrowed from his Venezuelan republican mentor, General Sebastián Francisco de Miranda, it also invokes Barry’s gender variance. But while Barry devoted an entire page of his M.D. dissertation to a dedication to Miranda and his ‘paternal care’, his signature on extant letters reads, simply, ‘James Barry’. James ‘Miranda’ Barry is a biographilic device, in the title of my book as elsewhere: the gender duality of the names is a knowing wink by contemporary authors to contemporary readers, not a tongue-in-cheek act of veiling and unveiling on the part of Barry himself.”

Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre - Ann Heilmann