Glorious Bodies
Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
A prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds.
In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery.
In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative account of theology’s value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trans identity long predates the 20th century, according to this ambitious debut from Gordon, an English professor at Bryn Mawr. Delving into the literature of the Renaissance, mainly religious writing like sermons and saints' lives, Gordon discovers evocative and often surreal examples of gender variance, including a crucified hermaphrodite, the apostles suckling Christ's breast, Saint Catherine of Siena sporting Christ's foreskin, and gender-fluid demons. Gordon offers these sources as proof that Renaissance-era people conceived of gender beyond the binary; he also uses them to challenge contemporary transphobia. Opening each chapter with a "peculiarly modern instance of trans panic"—like an anti-trans activist equating trans identity with a "white woman who claims to be a Korean cat"—Gordon goes on to identify these arguments' precedents in the Renaissance's punitive, state-backed theology and then demonstrates how the era's "trans theology... offer a counter-narrative." While some chapters get lost in the weeds of such extensive close reading, others are incisive, like when he uses Adam's "multiply gendered" body to challenge Pope Francis's assertion that transition is "an exploitation of creation." Slowed down by occasional academese, the book excels when Gordon writes with humor (as in his description of how John Donne "chose violence" during a couple's wedding sermon by musing on their gruesome deaths and glorious genderless rebirth). The result is an insightful contextualization of today's political battles over trans rights.
