Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern

Published by Cornell University Press 2021

Trans Historical

Gender Plurality before the Modern

Edited by: Greta LaFleur , Masha Raskolnikov and Anna Klosowska

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501759529

Overview
Contents

About this book

Trans Historical explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives—literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts—that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form.

The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal.

Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.

Author / Editor information

Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America.

Masha Raskolnikov is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University, and author of Body Against Soul.

Anna Kłosowska is Professor of French at Miami University, and coeditor of Disturbing Times.

Reviews

Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History:

This volume helps break trans studies out of its presentist biases and demonstrates its broader relevance to understanding premodernity. Trans studies offers a powerful lens for interrogating the world, and Trans Historical raises important historicist and metahistorical questions about how sexuality and gender have been variable and contingent across cultures, revealing and denaturalizing cis-normative assumptions about the past.

Ruth Evans, Saint Louis University, editor of A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages:

Trans Historical is an essential work for the study of trans people in history, showcasing meticulous scholarship from an impressive variety of disciplinary perspectives. Providing a powerful rejoinder to the common view that there were no trans people in premodern history, this volume will be indispensable for historians of gender and sexuality, as well as trans scholars who study the present moment.

The collection's concluding essays address methodological questions, frameworks, and terminology, offering many possibilities for approaching trans-centered analysis in medieval and early modern scholarship. Overall, the collection is an important contribution to the premodern era, and the diversity of sources, methodologies, and approaches will appeal to a wide variety of students and scholars.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: The Benefits of Being Trans Historical Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov and Anna Kłosowska Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Archives: Revisiting Law and Medicine
1. Mapping the Borders of Sex Leah DeVun Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2. Elenx de Céspedes: Indeterminate Genders in the Spanish Inquisition Igor Souza Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	42
3. The Case of Marin le Marcis Kathleen Long Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	68
4. The Transgender Turn: Eleanor Rykener Speaks and M. Bychowski Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
5. Wojciech of Poznań and the Trans Archive, Poland, 1550–1561 Anna Kłosowska Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	114
Part II. Frameworks: Representing Early Trans Lives
6. Recognizing Wilgefortis Robert Mills Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
7. Performing and Desiring Gender Variance in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire Abdulhamit Arvas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	160
8. Without Magic or Miracle: The Romance of Silence and the Prehistory of Genderqueerness Masha Raskolnikov Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	178
9. Transgender Translation, Humanism, and Periodization: Vasco da Lucena’s Deeds of Alexander the Great Zrinka Stahuljak Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Part III. Interventions: Critical Trans Methodologies
10. Visualizing the Trans-Animal Body: The Hyena in Medieval Bestiar Emma Campbell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
11. Maimed Limbs and Biosalvation: Rehabilitation Politics in Piers Micah Goodrich Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
12. Where Are All the Trans Women in Byzantium? Roland Betancourt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	297
13. Performing Reparative Transgender Identities from Stage Beauty to The King and the Clown Alexa Joubin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	322
14. Laid Open: Examining Genders in Early America Scott Larson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	350
Epilogue: Against Consensus Greta LaFleur Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	366
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	379
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	385

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 402
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 28
- Images: 28
- Other: 28 b&w halftones
Keywords: medieval transgender; early modern transgender; transgender history; trans people in literature; trans people in history

eBook

Published: November 15, 2021
ISBN: 9781501759529