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Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages
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About Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, And
Product Description A fascinating history of marginalized identities in the medieval worldWhile the term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Roland Betancourt explores these issues in the context of the Byzantine Empire, using sources from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. Highlighting nuanced and strikingly modern approaches by medieval writers, philosophers, theologians, and doctors, Betancourt offers a new history of gender, sexuality, and race.Betancourt weaves together art, literature, and an impressive array of texts to investigate depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin Mary, tactics of sexual shaming in the story of Empress Theodora, narratives of transgender monks, portrayals of same-gender desire in images of the Doubting Thomas, and stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in representations of the Ethiopian Eunuch. He also gathers evidence from medical manuals detailing everything from surgical practices for late terminations of pregnancy to save a mother’s life to a host of procedures used to affirm a person’s gender.Showing how understandings of gender, sexuality, and race have long been enmeshed, Byzantine Intersectionality offers a groundbreaking look at the culture of the medieval world. Review "This book is for the outcast and for those who inhabit the margins of the past and present. . . . Byzantine Intersectionality [also] provides art historians, archaeologists, and historians with a better theoretical basis for reconstructing the complex lived reality of queerness, sexual violence, consent, and racial profiling. The marginalized biblical figures and saints examined together serve as a new testament to how engrained systematic oppression functions in society." ---Sarah Bond, Hyperallergic " Byzantine Intersectionality . . . quotes Monica Lewinsky in its epigraph and brings an activist’s zeal to its queer-theory close readings of texts and images from the Eastern Roman Empire between the fourth and fifteenth centuries. By scouring legal, medical, and religious sources, and reading misogynist invectives against the grain, Betancourt builds a fascinating picture of more fluid attitudes and practices around sexuality than have been suggested in the mainstream historical record . . . the details Betancourt excavates can be as illuminating as they are juicy." ---Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine Review " Byzantine Intersectionality takes up the challenge of reading ancient texts―visual and linguistic―through the lens of contemporary methodologies and, even more daringly, current social identities and concepts. Dazzling in its analysis, thoroughly researched, and theoretically illuminating, this book changes not only how we see the Byzantine era, but also the stakes of recent work in queer, transgender, and critical race studies. Byzantine Intersectionality is for anyone who wants to learn how the past makes the present new." ―Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories "This radically interdisciplinary tour de force gives extraordinary insight into nonnormative Byzantine subjectivities while breathtakingly detailing how gender, race, and sexuality were understood and deployed. A magnificent book, Byzantine Intersectionality shows us how critical race theory and queer and transgender studies can change our understanding of the past." ―Steven Nelson, author of From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa " Byzantine Intersectionality aims at nothing less than the recuperation of trans identities of the premodern pas
