Anna Klosowska

Greta LaFleur

Masha Raskolnikov

Gender Plurality before the Modern

Trans Historical

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.

Gender Plurality Before the Modern

Sarah Keenan

Bambitchell

Marianne Shaneen

Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, Appendix A-L (2020) is a publication by Bambitchell, the artist collaboration of Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Kyle Mitchell, conceived in relationship to their experimental essay film Bugs & Beasts Before the Law (2019) that explores the history and legacy of the animal trials that took place across medieval and early modern Europe and its colonies in the Americas. The film follows events in which nonhuman animals were put on trial in courts, where they were prosecuted for various crimes ranging from trespassing to murder, as well as the related legal practice of deodand, punishing inanimate objects faulted for human fatality. This publication functions as an appendix to Bambitchell's film, taking readers on a journey through the artists' research. It riffs on the appendix from the 1906 book that inspired Bambitchell's project, E. P. Evans's The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, the first chapter of which is the foundational English-language text on the medieval animal trials. Using collage and intertextual layering, Bambitchell probes the definitive authority of Evans's record, creating a counter-archive that unravels the fictive unity of historical narrative. This layered narrative in text and image is about power performed through the body of the other, revealing how authorities and institutions mediate social relations and subjecthood through such processes as the formation of property and the criminalization of sexual difference. Various perversions of justice across time and space reveal that the absurd logic of the animal trials is not an anachronistic anomaly but rather an adaptive force that continues to shape lives unevenly and to define the bounds of freedom. This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Fall 2020-Spring 2021. Texts include an introduction by curator of the exhibition Nina Bozicnik; the Bugs & Beasts film script; an excerpt from Greta LaFleur's "Complexion of Sodomy," a chapter in her book The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins Press, 2018); and essays by Sarah Keenan (Mercer Union, 2019) and Marianne Shaneen.

Appendix A--L

Bugs & Beasts Before the Law

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.

Ultimately, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America not only rewrites all dominant scholarly narratives of eighteenth-century sexual behavior but poses a major intervention into queer theoretical understandings of the relationship between sex and the subject.

Greta LaFleur

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