Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature
Autor Professor Colby Gordonen Limba Engleză Hardback – 6 sep 2024
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.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780226834993
ISBN-10: 0226834999
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 22 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10: 0226834999
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 22 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Notă biografică
Colby Gordon is associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College.
Cuprins
Introduction. A Trans Crux
1. A Woman’s Prick: Trans Technogenesis in Sonnet 20
2. Abortive Hedgehogs: Prodigies and Trans Animality in The Duchess of Malfi
3. Egg Theory’s Early Modern Style; Or, John Donne’s Resurgent Flesh
4. Trans Mayhem in Samson Agonistes
Epilogue. The Final Crux: A Nonsecular Transition
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
1. A Woman’s Prick: Trans Technogenesis in Sonnet 20
2. Abortive Hedgehogs: Prodigies and Trans Animality in The Duchess of Malfi
3. Egg Theory’s Early Modern Style; Or, John Donne’s Resurgent Flesh
4. Trans Mayhem in Samson Agonistes
Epilogue. The Final Crux: A Nonsecular Transition
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Recenzii
“Beginning with its unexpected scrutiny of Holinshed’s Chronicles, Glorious Bodies reveals a trans imaginary underpinning the theology of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, Webster’s animal prodigies, Donne’s resurrected bodies, and Miltonian biopolitics. With creativity, verve, and wit, Gordon masterfully—indeed gloriously—demonstrates the stakes of trans studies for early modern studies writ large.”
“In this field-transforming book, Gordon accomplishes a double tour de force. He compellingly resurrects the trans-affirming capacity of many early modern theological categories explored in English literary works, thereby reclaiming trans life in our own moment as what it has always been: a sacred matter. Simultaneously, he shows how those categories’ enmeshment in early modern white world-making curtails their radical potential. Gordon’s gloriously intersectional vision of early modern trans studies is a revelation.”
“Glorious Bodies shows what’s possible when trans scholars write for trans readers. This book is ambitious in its scope, provocative in its style, and convincing in its claims—and, as Gordon makes clear, it is timely and urgent. We must consider carefully the terrain mined by transphobic thinkers—theology—and not concede its ground.”
“Glorious Bodies is a field-changing, original contribution to early modern literary and cultural studies, queer and trans studies, and the histories of religion and political theology. Gordon presents the trans potentials in religious texts in the full complexity of their contexts and erasures, and the book is successful not only in making a compelling case to bring theology back into premodern trans studies, but also in showing the urgent relevance of premodern trans studies for the current political moment.”
"Trans identity long predates the 20th century, according to this ambitious debut. . . 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. Gordon offers these sources as proof that Renaissance-era people conceived of gender beyond the binary; he also uses them to challenge contemporary transphobia. . . . An insightful contextualization of today’s political battles over trans rights."
"Gordon introduces his deeply interwoven themes: the political theology of transphobia, the complicity of secularism in transphobic violence and the recovery of a history of transition — all towards the politics of trans theology. Perhaps it is time, Gordon argues, to 'lean into the irrational pleasures and sublime possibilities of a nonsecular transness.' . . . With his jolting, rigorous book, Gordon reminds us not only of Jesus' otherness, but also that his otherness is inscribed on his very body, and on the bodies of his favorites."
"In this field-transforming monograph, Colby Gordon magisterially demonstrates that, in early modernity, 'transition happened, both socially and surgically, and that the significance of such alterations was glossed through the categories provided by theology.' . . . By drawing on early modern theology “as a resource for imagining projects of trans worldmaking” (16), Gordon reclaims trans life in our own times for what it has always been: a sacred matter. . . . Elegantly written, moving, and often irresistibly funny, Glorious Bodies is a revelatory monograph and a true gift to our field."
"This book is much needed. Glorious Bodies is an important addition to early modern studies and will also have resonance for more contemporary considerations of queer and trans histories. . . The stakes of Gordon’s book are clear. For too long trans people have been made an object of study rather than appreciated as makers of knowledge, despite a wealth of evidence of the long history of transition and cultivation of specialized knowledge about the making of bodies and gender. . .This field-changing book will undoubtedly transform those who read it as Gordon asks us to take seriously the glory of bodies and their constant process of becoming."