Nonbinary and Trans Premodernities

Abstract

If 2021 will forever be known as the second year of pandemic, it should also be celebrated among premodern scholars as the year that trans and nonbinary studies of the past arrived in force in the form of three published books. After a period in which trans studies has emerged to challenge both historical periods and contemporary gender and sexuality studies, it is exciting that medieval and early modern scholarship has so quickly and vibrantly begun to address trans issues in its histories and literatures. If Michel Foucault (1978), Judith Butler (1990), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) once urged gender and queer scholars to think of sexualities and genders in the plural beyond binarity and to work to recover that plurality in the historical past, they might not have anticipated the exciting heterogeneity and range of genders and sexualities that the three books I will be discussing below have so richly and abundantly charted. Nor could gender and queer scholars of premodernity have anticipated some of the theoretical provocations and historical documentation that these books assemble in the work of extending and challenging their work. The starting point for all three books is terminology, although the books accord with one another in their attention to the flexibility of their own terms, whether their titles cite “nonbinary gender,” “trans and genderqueer subjects,” or “trans histories.” Three overlapping aims also seem to unite the three books: to counter the presentism of our understanding of trans and nonbinary genders, to provide trans methodologies for studying literary and historical texts of the past, and quite simply to imagine transgender pasts and futures. The trans triad of scholarly books on premodern genders includes one monograph, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance by Leah DeVun, and two essay collections, Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Alice Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, and Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, edited by Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska. The sheer abundance and exuberance of new ways to think about medieval and early modern gender, sex, and embodiment is best suggested from the following list of terms and EXEMPLARIA 2022, VOL. 34, NO. 4, 363–371 https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2022.2132687