Intersecting Inequalities: The Representation of Religious, Gender, and Sexual Identities in the Life of Pelagia

Abstract

Abstract Repentant harlots who became trans saints presented Byzantine hagiographers with a challenge. Thought to exhibit a lack of self-control and the excessive sexuality, associated with women, and sex workers in particular, – a subject of great concern for monastic authors – how could members of this stigmatized group achieve the standards of Christian piety, let alone saintly behavior? In portraying its fictional protagonist as an exemplum of masculine virtues in the context of nascent Palestinian monasticism, the anonymous Life of Pelagia highlights the non-binariness of social identities in early Byzantium, unsettling fixed gender categorization. Conceiving of a trans figure of an ascetic subverting conventional binaries, the Life creates a model for incorporating non-conforming masculinities of Byzantine society within the normative hagiographic genre.