Description
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 Klosowska; 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: Greta LaFleur
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 11/15/2021
Pages: 402
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.67lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.06d
ISBN13: 9781501759086
ISBN10: 1501759086
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | LGBTQ+ Studies | Transgender Studies
- Literary Criticism | Medieval
- History | Europe | Medieval
About the Author
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 Klosowska is Professor of French at Miami University, and coeditor of Disturbing Times.