Hiraethi Jan Morris

Abstract

Within transgender studies, Jan Morris casts a problematic shadow, with Aren Aizura identifying how “Morris's entire literary and historical oeuvre . . . [is] a tacit articulation of a British colonial ideology.” Yet this position appears to be based on Morris's works between the 1950s and 1970s, up to and including her memoir Conundrum, and represents arguably only the first of three periods in Morris's writing. This essay argues that two subsequent periods diversify our understanding of Morris as a complex, transcultural figure: her broadly leftist, anticolonial writing on Wales and the Welsh language (1980s–90s), and then in the twenty-first century when Morris increasingly appears to question the colonial, nationalist, and cisheteropatriarchal ideologies that have shaped her previous writing. This essay concludes that Morris's body of work provides valuable evidence as to the complex interplay of Welsh, British, and European conceptions of gender that characterize her attitude and writing on transgender identity.