Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature

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[s] 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. (Sept.)