Leah DeVun

Olivia Treynor speaks to DeVun about nonbinary Jesus, gender in the apocalypse, a fourteenth-century ruling regarding an intersex individual, and what revisiting medieval concepts of gender offers contemporary discourse. In the process, DeVun startles us all out of assumptions we might unconsciously hold, illuminating a complicated history of gender and sex classification towards, perhaps, a more expansive future. American Academy of Religion / American Historical Association / Author Interview / Gender Studies / LGBTQIA studies / Pride Month / Religion

This (linked) episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, published in 2021 by Columbia University Press, and which sold out of its first printing. Interviewed by Leo Valdes, a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University studying 20th-century Black American and Latinx history. Please click the play button to launch the episode.

The intro is available on my personal website via the link. The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200–1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex.

The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkers—theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists—who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of “monstrous races” in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical “correction” of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions.

In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female—and human.

This essay examines painter Clarity Haynes's work in light of twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist depictions of childbirth, as well medieval and modern images of men and nonbinary figures giving birth. It includes works by Monica Sjöö, Judy Chicago, and Carmen Winant, as well as medieval and early modern Christian manuscript illuminations. More about the volume here: https://www.artbook.com/9798218181932.html.

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.

This essay focuses on intersex and the emerging profession of surgery in thirteenth- and fourteenth- century Europe. During this period, surgeons made novel claims about their authority to regulate sexual difference by surgically “correcting” sex-variant anatomies. Their theories about sex, I argue, drew upon both ancient roots and contemporary conflicts to conceptualize sexual difference in ways that influenced Western Europe for centuries thereafter. I argue that a close examination of medieval surgical texts complicates orthodox narratives in the broader history of sex and sexuality: medieval theorists approached sex in sophisticated and varied
manners that belie any simple opposition of modern and premodern paradigms. In addition, because surgical treatments of "hermaphrodites" in the Middle Ages prefigure in many ways the treatment of intersex in the modern world, I suggest that the writings of medieval surgeons have the potential to provide new perspectives on our current debates about surgery and sexual difference.

This article examines how ancient and medieval Christians invoked ideas about ‘hermaphrodites’ to work out fundamental questions about who we are as humans. What was the original or ideal state of humanity? Was the division of sex into male and female an inherent part of human nature? Certain Christian theologians, beginning in antiquity, claimed that Adam – the first human, according to the biblical book of Genesis – was an ‘androgyne’ or ‘hermaphrodite,’ that is, a combination of male and female sex. Similarly, some medieval theologians speculated that all post-resurrection bodies were androgynous. In conversations about both the creation and the resurrection, questions about sexual difference thus surfaced repeatedly, revealing key assumptions about the sexed body and its place in the narrative of Christian history. This article suggests that such debates were key to ancient and medieval efforts to determine which sexes were legitimate sexes, and therefore which lives were redeemably human.

"Trans*historicities: A Roundtable Discussion" offers reflections on transgender history and how thinking about time and chronology has impacted scholarship in trans studies in recent years. Contributing scholars come from numerous disciplines that touch on history, and have expertise in far-ranging geographic and temporal fields. As a broad conversation about some of the potential possibilities and difficulties in seeking out-and finding-trans in historical contexts, this discussion focuses on the complex interrelations between trans, time, and history. Contributors: M. W. Bychowski, Howard Chiang, Jack Halberstam, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Marcia Ochoa, and C. Riley Snorton.
Curated by Leah DeVun And Zeb Tortorici.

This textual and photographic essay documents obsessive pre-teen Miley Cyrus fans, drawing our attention to questions about media and celebrity culture, femininity and beauty image, economic class and consumption, and race, gender, and sexuality.

The archive has been theorized as unstable and even fever-ridden, but what might it mean to deploy it in ways that counter its logic, or to activate it in ways that we might call queer? Using the example of Leah DeVun’s photographic exploration of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (the world’s largest LGBT research collection), this essay traces the manners in which an archive, as a repository of information, might always shore up certain histories while delimiting others. In contrast, the authors imagine using the archive badly – that is, not as a historian would, but through interpolation and anachronism, focusing on the archive’s feel and “mere” form.  Rather than reconstructing the ways in which archival materials inhabit a discrete historical period, this essay explores what might it mean to focus our attention on the human agents that pull archival objects from circulation, as well as how such objects might circulate again. Ultimately, we consider an archive as an accretive space that continues to build up, and as a history in which we might live, rather than as a document of an already finished time.

A collaborative project that combines an essay and poems by Iyawó Kristin Naca with my photographs, taken during our trip to Havana, Cuba in 2014. The photographs document communities practicing the religion known as Regla Lucumí or Ocha (also called Santería), which originated in West Africa and traveled with the Atlantic slave trade to the island, where it has flourished. Several of my photographs (along with other images) serve as the basis for Iyawó's ekphrastic poetry.

This essay discusses “friendship books” (also known as “FBs”), handmade books that were passed through the mail by punks during the 1980s and 1990s. In some respects, friendship books functioned as an analog form of social networking, allowing teens to share interests and build communities long before the advent of Internet-based forms of social media. As in online communities now, the creators of friendship books shared musical discoveries, built visual vocabularies, and embedded themselves in networks ranging far beyond their schools and neighborhoods. While many recent exhibitions and publications have focused on punk, there's been less attention given to the friendships and epistolary traditions that were at the heart of the scene. My essay centers on these (coded feminine) aspects of punk in the form of the confessional letters, girly doodles, and fervent expressions of fandom that made up the affective world of FBs. Recent scholarly work on friendship, feeling, and the archival turn in feminism makes clear that there is widespread interest in topics with which the friendship books are engaged.

This issue of TSQ explores gender crossings that precede the terms " transgender " and " transsexual. " Drawing on Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura's formulation of trans-historicity, we propose a theoretical and methodological imagining of what constitutes trans* before the advent of the terms that scholars generally look to for the formation of modern conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. What might we find if we look for trans* before trans*? While some historians have rejected the categories of " transgender, " " transsexual, " and even " sexuality " to speak of experiences before the twentieth century, others have laid unabashed ancestral claim to those living gender-non-conforming lives in the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. As early as Leslie Feinberg's 1992 Transgender Liberation, scholars and activists have looked to the distant past for antecedents that might legitimate and inform present trans* identities. More recently, scholars have pointed to the genealogical significance of cross-dressers, hermaphrodites, bearded women, and others who have confounded binary gender, charting continuities and discontinuities with respect to current notions of queer and trans* subjectivity. Thinking trans*historically allows us to frame past bodies, forms, and essences through their multiple points of category formation and identity. While keeping gender, sex, and sexuality in our focus, we are sensitive to the ways in which such categories intersect with other states of being in earlier periods. By using the concept of trans*historicity, we aim to draw together past and present trans* phenomena while also emphasizing the historical specificity and variability of gendered systems of embodiment in different time periods. What scholarship currently explores trans* issues in the past? How does such work handle the tension between, on the one hand, historicism, and, on the other hand, queer temporality and asynchronicity? We hope to take stock of the field as it exists at this formative moment.

Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex is the book that all scholars should strive to write at least once in their lifetime: timely, accessible, and highly readable; diligently researched, meticulously conceptualized, and expansively impactful. Already, its mark is palpable both within the field of Medieval Studies and across a popular readership, particularly one invested in the histories of queer and trans peoples.

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List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments1. Introduction2. The Proving of Christendom3. John of Rupescissa's Vision of the End4. Alchemy in Theory and Practice5. Artists and the Art6. Metaphor and Alchemy7. The End of Nature8. ConclusionBibliographyNotesIndex