Trans in the Middle Ages

The following details the schedule of texts that participants at the Lexicon Project seminars gathered to discuss during Autumn and Winter quarter in the academic year 2020-2021. Further resources can be found at Things Transform run by Dr. M. W. Bychowski.

Friday October 23, 2020:

Dorothy Kim and M. W. Bychowski. “Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism: An Introduction.” Medieval Feminist Forum 55. 1 (2019) : 6-41.

Simone Chess, Colby Gordon and Will Fisher. “Introduction: Early Modern Trans Studies.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19. 4 (2019): 1-25.

Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici. “Trans, Time and History.” TSQ 5 (2018): 518-39. [optional]

Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura. The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge, 2013). [optional]

“Trans and Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language and Usage Guide,” from Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt. eds. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2020). [optional]

Friday November 6, 2020:

“Life of Saint Euphrosina” and “Life of Saint Marina,” in The Lady as Saint: a Collection of Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century, ed. and trans. by Brigette Cazelles (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 173-181; 238-257.
Saisha Grayson. “Disruptive Disguises: The Problem of Transvestite Saints for Medieval Art, Identity, and Identification.” Medieval Feminist Forum 45. 2 (2009): 138–174.
Jonathan Walker. “The Transtextuality of Transvestite Sainthood: or, How to Make the Gendered Form Fit the Generic Function.” Exemplaria 15 (2003): 73–110.
Vern L. Bullough. “Transvestites in the Middle Ages.” American Journal of Sociology 79. 6 (1974): 1381–1394. [optional]

Leslie Feinberg. “‘Holy War’ against Trans People,” in Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Beacon Press, 2007),67–73. [optional]

Gabrielle M. W. Bychowski. “Were there Transgender People in the Middle Ages?” [optional]

Kittredge Cherry, “Saint Wilgefortis: Holy bearded woman fascinates for centuries” [optional]

Friday December 4, 2020:

Theophylact of Ohrid, Defense of Eunuchs, trans. by Felix Szabo.

Jules Gleeson, “The Byzantine Eunuch: Pre-capitalist Gender Category, ‘Tributary’ Modal Contradiction, and a Test for Materialist Feminism” in Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism, ed. by Khayaar Fakier, Diana Mulinari and Nora Rathzel (Zed Books, 2020), 70-87.

Shaun Tougher, “Byzantine Court Eunuchs and the Macdeonian Dynasty (867-1056): Family, Power and Gender,” in Celibate and Childless Men in Power: Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern World, ed. by Almut Hofert, Matthew M. Mesley and Serena Tolino (Routledge, 2018), 229-245.

Margaret Mullet, “Theophylact of Ochrid’s In Defense of Eunuchs,” in Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond, ed. by Shaun Tougher (Classical Press of Wales, 2002), 177-198. [optional]

Kathryn M. Ringrose, “Living in the Shadows: Eunuchs and Gender in Byzantium,” in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (Zone Books, 1993), 85-109. [optional]

Thursday January 14, 2021

Jessica A. Boon, Associate Professor of Medieval/Early Modern Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill, will discuss her draft paper “A Bigender Christ in a (Dis)abled Body: The Visionary Sermons of Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534).”

Juana de la Cruz, “Sermon 1: Incarnation,” in Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481-1534: Visionary Sermons, ed. by Jessica A. Boon and Roland E. Surtz, trans. by Ronald E. Surtz and Nora Weinerth (Iter Academic Press, 2016), 37-65.

Jessica A. Boon, “At the Limits of (Trans)Gender: Jesus, Mary, and the Angels in the Visionary Sermons of Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534),” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 48.2 (2018): 261-300.

Friday January 29,2021

Selections from the Roman de Silence, ed. and trans. by Sarah Roche-Mahdi, in Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance (East Lansing, 1992).

Selections from Tristan de Nanteuil, trans. by Jacqueline Victor.

Blake Gutt, “Transgender Genealogy in Tristan de Nanteuil,” Exemplaria 30.2 (2018): 129-146.

Friday February 19, 2021

David Lorenzo Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London,” GLQ 1 (1995): 459-465.

Ruth Mazo Karras and Tom Linkinen, “John/Eleanor Rykener Revisted,” in Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns, ed. by Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O’Sullivan (Suffolk, England, 2016), 112-121.

Emma Heaney, “Materialist Trans Feminism against Queer Theory,” in The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Evanston, 2017), 253-297.

Gabby Benavente and Julian Gill-Peterson, “The Promise of Trans Critique: Susan Stryker’s Queer Theory,” GLQ 25.1 (2019): 23-28.