Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Following the Traces: Reassessing the Status Quo, Reinscribing Trans and Genderqueer Realities
- Peripheral Vision(s): Objects, Images, and Identities
- Genre, Gender, and Trans Textualities
- Epilogue: Beyond Binaries: A Reflection on the (Trans) Gender(s) of Saints
- Appendix: Trans and Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Following the Traces: Reassessing the Status Quo, Reinscribing Trans and Genderqueer Realities
- Peripheral Vision(s): Objects, Images, and Identities
- Genre, Gender, and Trans Textualities
- Epilogue: Beyond Binaries: A Reflection on the (Trans) Gender(s) of Saints
- Appendix: Trans and Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The Introduction sets out the rationale for the collection, and the significance and scope of trans studies, in the Middle Ages and beyond. It includes concise coverage of key scholarship in the field, contextualizing the volume and its chapters accordingly. It concludes with a chapter-bychapter snapshot of the collection as a whole, explaining the thematic structures underpinning the volume's analytical work.
Keywords: medieval studies, gender studies, gender theory, trans studies
In hir pioneering study, Transgender Warriors, Leslie Feinberg writes: ‘I couldn't find myself in history. No-one like me seemed to have ever existed’. Working for transgender rights entails striving towards the visibility and acceptance of transgender lives. Yet something more than tolerance of trans people's physical existence in the present is required. That something is full ideological existence – the ability to imagine a transgender past, and a transgender future. In this volume, ‘transgender’ is employed as a broad umbrella, including genderqueer, genderfluid, and non-binary identities, and is also used as a rubric for discussing ways of being that disrupt normative notions of binary gender/sex. We reference both transgender and genderqueer subjects in the title of the volume precisely to indicate that both formations operate against – and through – the same normative socio-cultural structures. ‘Transgender’, as a category, is a subset of ‘queer’, understood as defiant and often explicitly political non-normativity. Queerness encompasses sexualities and gender identities deemed ‘atypical’ in their cultural setting, as well as a mode of being in the world that questions dominant norms. Trans theories and readings emerge from the framework of queer theory, and owe much to its innovations. Yet ‘trans’ cannot be fully contained within the borders of ‘queer’. If queer was the call, trans is one of many responses. Trans scholarship brings its insights to bear through specific ways of feeling, knowing, and attending to sources that explore resonances between trans, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming lives across history. The term ‘subjects’ does double duty in the collection's title, referring to individuals and to topics, traces, and resonances which destabilize modern impositions of fixed binary gender on premodern culture(s).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography , pp. 11 - 40Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021