Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern

Trans Historical explores the diversity of gender experiences that existed before the modern era, focusing on archives that challenge the notion of gender as a binary category. The volume's multidisciplinary contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from sex assignment at birth.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 402 pages
Publication date: 11 November 2021
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Trans Historical delves into the rich tapestry of gender experiences that thrived before the modern era, spanning from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a vast geographical expanse, from Spain to Poland, Byzantium to Boston. Countering claims that transgender people, experiences, and identities were nonexistent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume centers on archival materials—including literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts—that challenge the notion of gender as a fixed category. By historicizing the diverse social lives of sexual differentiation, the volume explores what gender might have been before the advent of modern medicine, anatomical sciences, and the consolidation of gender difference into its supposedly binary form.

A multidisciplinary group of contributors, comprising scholars from various fields, examines how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience separate from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical inquiries into 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 to this volume include renowned experts such as Abdulhamit Arvas, Roland Betancourt, M. W. Bychowski, Emma Campbell, Igor H. de Souza, Leah DeVun, Micah James Goodrich, Alexa Alice Joubin, Anna Kłosowska, Greta LaFleur, Scott Larson, Kathleen Perry Long, Robert Mills, Masha Raskolnikov, and Zrinka. Their insights and perspectives shed light on the multifaceted nature of gender in the past and contribute to a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural complexities of gender identity.

Weight: 572g
Dimension: 152 x 228 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501759505