Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern Paperback – November 15, 2021 by Greta LaFleur

Description

Author: LaFleur Greta

Package Dimensions: 0x229x27

Number Of Pages: 402

Release Date: 15-09-2021

Details: Product 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 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.

Review

“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.” — Ruth Evans, Saint Louis University, editor of
A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages

“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.” — Susan Stryker, author of
Transgender History

Review

“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.” — Susan Stryker, author of
Transgender History

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