Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography - out now!

Update — May 2023 — Trans and Genderqueer Subjects is now available in paperback, and Open Access, entirely free online. Happy reading, friends! <3

'Jesus Love' gif, by Kawave (via GIPHY)

In the summer of 2016, I got very, very pissed off. Well, to be fair, I had been pissed off about this thing for-basically-ever, but now I had officially Had Enough. I’ve worked on medieval saints’ lives and medieval religion since I was an academic fetus. If there’s one thing that even a cursory glance at the texts will tell you, it’s that medieval saints do not do gender like the cis-heteronormative patriarchy thinks they should.

Gender is slippery in hagiography. For many saints, the utility of the male/female binary is in its transgression, as a marker of authenticity, of holiness, of shedding one’s normative earthly bounds. How could it be otherwise, when Christ in the Middle Ages is by turns a lactating mother, a diligent father, an infant son, a potent lover to monks, nuns, everyone? God is multiple as the Trinity, beyond gender in its earthly forms. The Immaculate Conception is the quintessential queer generation. And yet, and yet. Medieval scholarship, even feminist scholarship, had not caught on, it seemed. The presence of trans and genderqueer identities was at best ignored, dismissed derogratorily, or actively suppressed. Many academic works - see, especially the corpus on ‘cross-dressing’ saints - trafficked in trans- and queerphobia. Some were upfront in their transphobia; in other scholary pieces, the ignorance, the violence simmered latently. I can’t remember what I had been reading in the summer of 2016, but it was one of these kind of “critiques”. And, just, NOPE, not today Satan. So I put together a call for papers on trans and genderqueer sanctity at the following year’s International Medieval Congress. The response was enthusiastic, I had tons of abstracts. I wound up organizing two panels, the maximum I could feasibly negotatiate with conference organizers, though we could have filled a couple more slots too.

That pair of panels featured up-and-coming researchers, junior scholars, and senior colleagues in urgent - joyous - dialogue about the transness of, and in, medieval hagiography. It was so, so fucking good. I watched speaker after speaker bring the conference house down with incisive, rigorous - even intimate - analyses of medieval trans sanctity - of transness as sanctity, full stop - and I knew that this urgent moment couldn’t end here. More people needed to hear this engaged, embodied, politicized work. Did somebody say essay collection? Yes, yes they did. First item on the agenda: recruit a co-conspirator.

It was a no-brainer, really. Blake Gutt is a pioneer in medieval trans studies. He’s one of the best thinkers on gender I have ever met, not to mention a deeply fine human and a very dear friend. Blake got it immediately, and our vision for what the volume could be, should be, vibed exquisitely.

We wanted to showcase the urgent, awesome, effective and affective research of scholars working on trans and genderqueer sanctity.

We wanted especially to uplift the voices of members of the medievalist trans and genderqueer community, scholars who are marginalized by trans- and queerphobia in and outside of the Academy, who often find themselves in precarious situations: short-term underpaid contracts which are the norm of the early-career swamp, junior scholars still working on their postgraduate projects.

We wanted to offer a blueprint for ethical scholarship on trans and genderqueer identities, one that insists upon (medievalist) cis scholars’ engaged allyship for the modern trans and genderqueer community. We wanted to speak frankly about the systemic problems in the Academy - particularly the intersection of trans- and queerphobia with white supremacy. We wanted to issue a call to arms for cis-hetero culture to do better, in medievalist work, in the modern Academy, in our twenty-first century moment more generally.

At the same time, we wanted to underscore the joy of transness: trans lives are not just about dysphoria, but euphoria too. We wanted to excise analytically the ‘discourse’ of transness as disguise or deception, to show instead that trans and genderqueer identities crystallize an authenticity that can only be described as sacral. We wanted to insist - with oh-so-many receipts - that trans and genderqueer people are not some postmodern ‘invention’, but they have been in the world as long as there has been a world to speak of.

This is the origin story of the Trans and Genderquer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography essay collection, which came out earlier this month with Amsterdam University Press. I could not be more proud of our volume, and of each and every one of our contributors. I hope our collective work speaks to you, and is effective in affirming what some of us have always already known: the integral value of trans and genderqueer identities across time.

For a flavour of the collection, here’s the Table of Contents:

  • Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, ‘Introduction’ (abstract; download for free here)

  • Martha G. Newman, ‘Assigned Female at Death: Joseph of Schönau and the Disruption of Medieval Gender Binaries’ (abstract)

  • Caitlyn McLoughlin, ‘Inherited Futures and Queer Privilege: Capgrave’s Life of St Katherine’ (abstract)

  • Kevin C.A. Elphick, ‘Juana de la Cruz: Gender-Transcendent Prophetess’ (abstract)

  • Felix Szabo, ‘ Non-Standard Masculinity and Sainthood in Niketas David’s Life of Patriarch Ignatios’ (abstract)

  • Sophie Sexon, 'Gender-Querying Christ’s Wounds: A Non-Binary Interpretation of Christ’s Body in Late Medieval Imagery’ (abstract)

  • Vanessa Wright, ‘ Illuminating Queer Gender Identity in the Manuscripts of the Vie de sainte Eufrosine’ (abstract)

  • Lee Colwill, ‘The Queerly Departed: Narratives of Veneration in the Burials of Late Iron Age Scandinavia’ (abstract)

  • Amy V. Ogden, ‘St Eufrosine’s Invitation to Gender Transgression’ (abstract)

  • Blake Gutt, ‘Holy Queer and Holy Cure: Sanctity, Disability, and Transgender Embodiment in Tristan de Nanteuil’ (abstract)

  • M.W. Bychowski, ‘The Authentic Lives of Transgender Saints: Imago Dei and imitatio Christi in the Life of St Marinos the Monk’ (abstract)

  • Mathilde van Dijk, ‘Epilogue. Beyond Binaries: A Reflection on the (Trans) Gender(s) of Saints’ (abstract)

  • Appendix. ‘Trans and Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide’ (download for free here)

In our co-authored ‘Introduction’, Blake and I articulate our call to action, and sketch our vision for future trans medievalist work of this kind. We summarize key scholarship in the field, and offer an overview of the collection as a whole, with precis of individual chapters and discussion of how individual essays fit together into a larger scholarly mosaic. You can download the ‘Introduction’ for free as a pdf from the Press’ website.

There is no excuse for transphobic scholarship or expression. Some people, however, use violent language out of ignorance and a lack of confidence with the relevant, repectful phraseology and usage. For this reason, we include in the volume the ‘Trans and Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide’, a resource developed with the input of members of the trans and genderqueer medievalist community. The ‘Guide’ is bundled with the ‘Introduction’ as a pdf to download for free from the Press’ website. Please share it with any and all parties for whom it will be useful. We offer this guide with an explicit message: cis scholars now have the tools to do better, there are no more ‘free passes’, if ever there were.

Beyond these free pdfs, Blake and I are committed to facilitating access to the volume for members of the trans and genderqueer community. If you’d like to read it, but are having trouble getting access, contact me and we will help figure something out. If you’re in the UK, the Gender Community Lending Library has a copy, donated by Amsterdam University Press. The Library is free to join, and sends out loans by post.

Jonah Coman lent his genius to us, producing the magnificent cover art for our book, with a piece entitled ‘We have always been here’. We consider his image to be a core part of our collection, as a ‘visual chapter’. The images are so YASSSSS that we just had to turn them into stickers. We will be giving away 25 sets of trans and genderqueer saints’ stickers as part of the volume’s online launch in May - so keep a keen eye out on Twitter for more details, as we’ll be sharing them as soon as we have them.