Read Online Free The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance by Leah DeVun - RBB

The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of hermaphrodites--as individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender binaries were called--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 hermaphrodites.DeVun examines a host ofThe Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of hermaphrodites--as individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender binaries were called--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 hermaphrodites.DeVun examines a host of thinkers--theologians cartographers natural philosophers lawyers poets surgeons and alchemists--who used ideas about hermaphrodites as conceptual tools to order their political cultural and natural worlds. She 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 hermaphroditism in early Christianity its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century and a new enthusiasm for hermaphroditic transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were hermaphrodites; images of monstrous races in encyclopedias maps and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly hermaphroditic 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.(less)

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