The
contemporary New York-based artist and historian Leah DeVun’s artwork,
scholarship, and curation focus on the history of gender and sexuality, science
and technology, the history of premodern Europe, the history of science and
medicine, archives and collectives, and contemporary feminist and LGBT politics
and histories. DeVun is currently an associate professor at Rutgers University,
where they teach in the departments of History and Women's, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies. They are also the author of two co-edited volumes and books:
Trans*historicities, a special issue of the journal Transgender Studies
Quarterly (Duke University Press, 2018), and Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of
Time (Columbia University Press, 2009). DeVun’s reviews and essays have been
featured in publications such as Radical History Review, Wired, Journal of the
History of Sexuality, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Spot among others. In
their latest work, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the
Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021), DeVun reconstructs the
contradictory yet complex cultural landscape of premodern Europe as navigated
by individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories.
M. BUNA:
From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, the nonbinary figure, whether called an
“androgyne” or a “hermaphrodite,” was used as an analytical tool to create
orders and outline what stood outside them. By refusing to accept binary modes
of sex and gender as natural or even unchangeable based on their assigned positive
or negative value, seductive possibilities (and politics) can come into being.
Could you expand on the role played by premodern nonbinarity in conceiving such
alternatives?
Leah
DeVun: My book argues that sex categorization in premodern Europe was a social
process that determined who belonged inside of the category of humanity and,
for that reason, who was entitled to ethical protections from violence and
death. Much of my book centers on how, from the 12th to the 14th century,
Christian Europeans used accusations of nonbinary sex (the charge that a person
or community was something other than simply male or female) to stigmatize
populations, justify violence against them, and facilitate their wholesale
removal from a territory. And yet, ideas about nonbinary sex over this long
period weren’t monolithic, and they weren’t static. Other thinkers in premodern
Europe identified nonbinary sex with angels and heaven, Adam and Eve, and Jesus
— some of the most idealized figures in European history. The “Jesus
hermaphrodite,” a way of depicting Jesus in the late Middle Ages and early
Renaissance as a perfect balance of male and female traits, suggested that
transgressing binary gender categories could lead to physical and spiritual
transformation for humans. A deep history of nonbinary gender helps us see that
sex categories beyond male and female have been with us for a very long time,
and they weren’t always just something to be corrected or rejected. Images of
nonbinary gender as perfect, aspirational, and transformational go to one of
the main points of my book: that the preference for sexual binarism (the idea
that only male and female are legitimate and real sexes) is a historically
situated phenomenon that waxes and wanes, not a natural or inevitable division
of humankind.
MB : When
documenting the ascendancy of the binary model, you draw attention to the
patriarchal doctrines legitimated by it. Medieval authors saw androgyny less as
a gender equality issue than as a different validation of the same hegemonic
masculinity. How did sexual and gender difference become primary concerns once
humanity was speculated upon and rendered instrumental in privileging some
bodies over others?
LD : My
approach partly comes from my desire to intervene in transphobic arguments in
the very place where many of them are perceived to originate: in early
Christian tradition. Conservative Christians now sometimes hold up the biblical
story of Adam and Eve as evidence that God intended humans to come in just male
and female sexes, but not all past authorities read the Bible this way. Some
Jewish and early Christian thinkers imagined that God first created humans with
an “androgynous” or undifferentiated sex, before later splitting humans into
binary-sexed men and women. To these thinkers, the original and ideal state of
humanity, as it was intended by God, was nonbinary-sexed. While some religious
authorities tried to stamp out this theory, others continued to repeat the
nonbinary creation story, and we find this story cropping up again and again
for roughly a thousand years. But this theory of androgynous creation didn’t
aim to elevate women or put the sexes on equal footing. The general goal was to
transcend sexual difference, often by absorbing the female into the male and producing
a kind of male-inflected androgyny. So even in conversations that idealized
androgyny and sexual undifferentiation, we can still find gender hierarchy, and
when we find it, maleness is positioned above femaleness. I argue that these
stories about creation are important because they were a past way of making
sense of the origins and value of doctrines like marriage and patriarchy. When
premodern Europeans theorized sex, gender, and difference, they did it by
talking about Adam and Eve, or heaven and hell, or what happened to bodies
after death and resurrection. But these conversations were always grounds for
serious theorizations of embodiment and difference, and they became the means
to privilege some bodies over others.
MB : Always
produced by particular circumstances, the monster transgresses the strictures
of binaries. But once the monster got equated with the hermaphrodite in
medieval European culture, a new geography informed by colonial and racist
thinking drew its maps. What were the ambiguous spaces occupied by the
nonbinary figure in such exclusionary cartography?
LD : Premodern
European Christians tended to imagine Asia and Africa as populated with exotic,
monstrous populations whose bodies and cultural practices transgressed European
social and sexual rules. We can see an example of this on the Hereford Map, a
14th-century English map of the world, which pictured Ethiopia as a barren,
uncivilized place inhabited by monsters, including monsters with
nonbinary-sexed anatomies and gender nonconforming practices. These projections
of monstrosity and gender nonconformity onto Africa certainly anticipate later
colonial and racist imaginaries in Europe. But an absolute distinction between
Europe/non-Europe and binary/nonbinary was never so simple. To give just one
example, after describing mythic societies of gender-switching “androgynes”
living in Africa or Asia, some medieval European writers immediately reflected
on intersex people who lived in their own communities, writing about how they
should be integrated into binary social categories. Far from relegating
nonbinary sex to a safely distant margin outside Europe, these texts emphasized
that Europe could also include such variations. The texts reveal complex and
open-ended ways of thinking about nonbinary sex, allowing Europeans to see
parallels between themselves and their Asian and African counterparts, as well
as to identify the so-called “other” of nonbinary sex within themselves. But
it’s also important to note that, in these writings, intersex individuals in
Europe were expected to fit within binary gender roles, and to avoid violating
legal and ritual rules surrounding gender inversion and same-sex sexuality,
while imaginary African and Asian “androgynes” flouted such rules. Stories
about foreign gender inversion and sexual rule-breaking were no doubt escapist
and semi-pornographic entertainment for European audiences, but these writings
were serious too, making clear which gender and sexual practices were
considered proper to civilized humans. Because Europeans expressed uncertainty
about the human status of monstrous peoples abroad, those regions identified
with monsters, especially Africa and Asia, became associated with inhumanity in
the eyes of Europeans.
MB : Departing
from the monster narrative and softening boundaries between human and nonhuman
species, medieval bestiaries used the allegedly negative qualities of nonbinary
anatomies and practices as cautionary tale about threats to the former. For
what reasons did “hermaphroditizing” become a sharp instrument in dehumanizing
non-Christianity within the pages of these moralizing compendiums?
LD : In
response to increased social and political contacts with Muslims and Jews (and
in the wake of Christian military expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, now
often called “the crusades”), medieval Christians tried to distinguish
themselves much more clearly from non-Christians. They pointed to alleged
physical and gendered differences between themselves and Jews and Muslims, whom
they painted as both lesser and external to their own community. Especially
during the 12th to 14th centuries, some very widespread Christian texts
depicted Jews or Muslims as “hermaphrodites” who could transition back and
forth between male and female sex. English bestiaries (animal catalogs), for
instance, pictured sex-changing and demonic-looking “Jewish” hyenas with both
male and female genitals. These figures were shown eating the flesh of
vulnerable (presumably Christian) human bodies. Despite the massacres of Jews
in nearby towns and the expulsions of Jewish communities that had recently
occurred or were soon to occur in England, these texts argued that it was
Christians who were under attack by nonbinary-sexed Jewish aggressors.
MB : Legal
and naturalist discourses of the 13th and 14th centuries weren’t based on a
clear-cut distinction between sexing the human body and gendering it. In what
ways did the medieval approach diverge from the one advanced by modern gender
scholarship?
LD : Today,
we tend to talk about sex and gender as different modes of classification, one
focused on “biology” and the other focused on social practice or an internal
sense of self, and these may or may not line up within an individual. This
sex/gender distinction is helpful for explaining transgender, i.e., one’s
social gender diverges from one’s biological sex assigned at birth. But the
premodern thinkers I write about didn’t have a firm distinction between sexing
and gendering the body. They collapsed sex and gender (and to some extent
sexuality) into a single form of difference that they called sexus (Latin for
“sex”). For them, what made men and women different from each other was a
combination of physiological and anatomical features that also revealed and
determined men and women’s different social roles. When authorities tried to
sort intersex individuals into a male or female category, they used gendered
social characteristics to determine a person’s biological category (did this
person like “male” pursuits like riding horses and wielding swords, or “female”
ones like sewing? did this person prefer to have sex “as a man” or “as a
woman”?). “Biological” sex was in these cases determined by a person’s social
role, and there was no real ontological distinction between the two. Of course,
queer and feminist scholars have argued much the same about our own modern
world, showing us that what we think of as scientific, biological signs of sex
reflect cultural gendered biases rather than any objective truth about the
body. So what we see in the premodern period doesn’t diverge completely from
how the sex/gender distinction operates in our own time.
MB : In
Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment, Aren Z.
Aizura writes about contemporary gender reassignment surgeries as
“transnational entrepreneurialisms of the self.” When you write about medieval
Western European surgeons “correcting” nonbinary bodies without paying any
attention to the individual’s own personal sense of self, you argue that such
examples should also be read “through the modern analytic of transgender.” Why
do you think the transgender category would be useful in the examination of
medieval sex/gender/sexual crossings?
LD : One
of the big surprises of my research was that premodern Europeans advocated
performing surgeries on intersex individuals and other people whose anatomies
challenged male-female binaries. I write about how Christian medical
authorities, beginning in the 13th century, argued that humans could only be
born as male or female, rather than as one of several nonbinary sexes on a
spectrum of sexual difference, which a number of thinkers had previously argued
was possible. Those with nonbinary bodies (including intersex people) were to
be surgically “corrected” to reshape them into standard men or women, which
nature had supposedly intended to produce. These surgeries are not really
comparable to modern-day gender-affirming surgeries chosen by trans people.
They more closely resemble the normalizing surgeries that are still performed
on intersex infants in the United States (despite decades of advocacy against
them by intersex activists and allies), which try to fit diverse bodies into
the constraints of binary forms. So why think of these medieval phenomena as
part of transgender history? I argue that placing these ideas and practices
within not only intersex but also transgender history helps to direct our
attention toward the centrality of transition to premodern thinking about
nonbinary sex.
Authors
consistently focused on what they imagined to be the threatening possibility of
gender-crossing by nonbinary bodies. Lawyers, clerics, and medical authorities
were often less concerned about the specific shapes of bodies, but rather that
their possessors might transition back and forth between male and female gender
roles, or take both an active (penetrator) and passive (penetrated) role in
sexual intercourse. Nearly all of the polemics against nonbinary sex emphasize
that it’s gender-crossing and deviant sexuality (and deviant because of its
gender inversion, i.e., men acting like women, or women acting like men) that
are their main concerns. Much of the rhetoric we see is focused on trying to
prevent gender transition by fixing people into stable gendered and sexual
roles by whatever legal or medical means were available. But Aizura’s book is
really helpful for thinking about other aspects of the medieval sexual
worldview, even if not its trans entrepreneurial agency. As Aizura writes,
modern transgender biographies often use tropes of travel, and geographic
metaphors (including Orientalist fantasies) appear regularly in contemporary
narratives of gender transition. These ideas about spatiality and mobility have
strong parallels in how medieval European thinkers thought about gender through
geography, for instance, in their projections of nonbinary-gendered fantasies
onto Africa and Asia (both of which they considered “the East”). Medieval
sources were already making creative use of the intersection of gender and
spatial mobility, and travel and mapping were important ways for thinking about
gender transition during this much earlier period.
MB
: In studying how historical contexts
shaped sex and gender binaries together with efforts to manipulate bodies
accordingly, your critical chronology of sexual difference is also underscored
by who qualifies to be a proper human even to this day. Why should your work be
engaged with and by whom?
LD
: Even now, we can see how gender plays
a central role in legitimizing personhood, granting only the full range of
human privileges (including the ability to do what you want with your body, or
being able to avoid having things you don’t want done to your body) to
individuals who fit into accepted categories, while withholding it from those
whose bodies or gendered practices are considered unnatural or unacceptable.
Looking at a long history is especially crucial now because we (and I include
members of the trans and queer community) tend to view debates about gender
nonconformity as relatively new, and their newness is precisely what’s
threatening to “traditional gender,” as argued by transphobes. My work
challenges this assumption of newness by showing that nonbinary people and
practices have existed for millennia: they weren’t rare and they weren’t always
viewed negatively. Beyond this, societies in the distant past thought deeply
about systems of sex and gender, and they debated them, just as we do now. We
can’t locate an earlier period of “traditional” gender before nonbinary people
and categories complicated things. This can help us to put our current moment
in some historical perspective. Beyond this, past ideas about nonbinary sex
shouldn’t only be relevant to LGBTQ people now.
Ideas
about nonbinary sex and gender were a part of how premodern people defined
themselves as Christian, European, male, female, or human. These are not
marginal or trivial concerns, and we need to understand nonbinary history to
appreciate how these foundational categories developed. By understanding
history, we can see how some earlier ideas and practices anticipate our own,
which can give us a better understanding of why we think and do some of the
things we do now. But sometimes the past introduces us to radically different
cultures, and I think that helps us to imagine radically different futures for
ourselves too. In our own time, when we’re facing transphobic “bathroom bills,”
unwanted medical procedures forced on intersex people, and bans on offering
medical care to trans children, transformative politics are urgent and necessary.
While ancient and medieval categories and concerns aren’t the same as the ones
we have now, I hope my book and the relationship it suggests between past and
present can help support liberatory politics. I hope it can be accessible both
inside and outside of the classroom, and I hope it can expand our archive and
timeline for the history of gender marginalized people, while also fueling
efforts to reduce harm against them now.
The
Shape of Premodern Nonbinarity: A Conversation with Leah DeVun. Los Angeles Review of Books , August 28, 2021.
Liam
Miller sat down with Leah DeVun to
discuss her book, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the
Renaissance (Columbia UP, 2021). We talk about how widespread thinking and
writing about non-binary individuals was during the first centuries of the CE
and again in the C12th-14th, plus the way non-binary bodies actually shaped the
way a host of categories and boundaries (not just gender) were demarcated. We
talk in detail about the shift in the C12th/13th and the way non-binary sex
shaped the project of establishing a non-human other, justifying violence
towards Jews and Muslims, and determining who could live in a Christian
territory. We also talk about the figures of "Adam androgyne" and the
"Jesus hermaphrodite", and how they function as "anchors of
eschatological time." Finally, Leah discusses how this study can inform
our present, not only by showing that the consideration of non-binary, trans*,
and intersex bodies are not novel to our period, but how this consideration
cuts through claims of 'natural and immutable' in our own day.
The
Shape of Sex, Leah DeVun. Interview Liam Miller. Love –Rinse/Repeat. August 16, 2021
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, it
reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas
about nonbinary sex. In doing so, 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.
NOTCHES:
In a few sentences, what is your book about?
Leah
DeVun: The Shape of Sex is about sex and gender beyond the male-female binary
in Christian Europe from about 200-1400 CE. I look at the cultural world that
was navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary, as
well as how thinkers used ideas about nonbinary sex to make distinctions
between not only men and women, but also humans and animals, Europeans and
non-Europeans, and Christians and non-Christians. These distinctions allowed
thinkers – lawyers, clerics, physicians, poets, alchemists, and others — to
define what it meant to be human, and to make claims about who should be
accepted as a member of the human community.
In our
own time, when ideas about sex and gender are the subject of so much
controversy, I argue that looking to the distant past can give us perspectives
on present-day categories like intersex, transgender, and nonbinary gender.
While ancient and medieval categories aren’t the same as modern ones, a deep
history shows us that sexual binarism isn’t a timeless or natural division of
humankind, and that history can help us to imagine different worlds in the
future.
NOTCHES:
Your book begins with Adam and Eve, who are often cited by defenders of
‘traditional’ ideas about sex and gender. But your research suggests that early
Christians sometimes saw the first humans as androgynous figures. How did this
idea emerge, and how far was it accepted?
DeVun:
Conservative Christians now often hold up the story of Adam and Eve as clear
proof that God intended humans to come in just male and female sexes, but
people haven’t always read Genesis that way. A number of Jewish and early
Christian thinkers interpreted the language of Genesis (which seemed to at
least some of them to describe two different, and difficult to reconcile,
creation stories) as showing that God first created humans with an
“androgynous” or undifferentiated sex, before later splitting humans into
binary-sexed men and women. To these early readers, the original and ideal
state of humanity — as it was intended by God — was nonbinary sexed. While some
religious authorities tried to stamp out this theory, others continued to find
a nonbinary creation story compelling, and we find this interpretation repeated
over and over again for roughly a thousand years.
This
history is good reminder that sex categories beyond male and female aren’t new:
they’ve been with us for a very long time. It also shows us that nonbinary sex
wasn’t always viewed negatively, or as something to be erased or corrected.
Nonbinary sex could be associated with Adam and Eve — and also with Jesus,
angels, and the resurrection. Nonbinary sex could be presented as something
ideal, pure, or transformative.
NOTCHES:
You identify a shift in attitudes from the twelfth century onwards, with
nonbinary individuals and identities presented in increasingly negative terms.
Why did this happen, and how did it relate to fears about/ prejudices against
other groups?
DeVun:
Two important things happened – and they both came from greater Christian
European contact with the Muslim political and intellectual worlds during the
time of the Christian holy wars (aka the Crusades). First, during that time,
“naturalist” (what we might call early scientific) writings from the Muslim
world became increasingly accessible in Western Europe. These writings included
ancient Greek medical and philosophical ideas, as well as indigenous ones from
Muslim intellectuals. Once these works were translated from Arabic into Latin,
educated Western Europeans could read them, and their contents became extremely
important and trendy. They eventually shaped how certain influential Western
European medical and surgical writers thought about sex and the human body. These
newly available ideas – especially those associated with the Greek philosopher
Aristotle — tended to advocate for a binary model of sex, that is, they argued
that all humans were one of two sexes – male or female — with nothing in
between. The embrace of this claim by educated Europeans constituted an
important change because we can identify a number of “spectrum”-based medical
texts from before this period that argued that humans came in multiple sexes
between male and female. While the “spectrum” model continued to hold some
sway, the binary model became the dominant way of thinking about sex among
certain circles for centuries thereafter. Western European surgeons began to
argue that humans could not be born as something other than male or female, and
some of them argued that intersex individuals should be surgically “corrected”
with operations that would reshape their bodies into what surgeons thought men
and women should look like.
Second,
during this same time period, Christians in parts of Western Europe began to
distinguish themselves much more clearly from Jews and Muslims, including
through rhetoric designed to disparage non-Christians. During this period, we
see a number of Christian images depicting Jews or Muslims as “hermaphrodites”
who could allegedly change back and forth between male and female sex. These
texts were intended to insult Jews and Muslims and to link their supposed
nonbinary sex to foreignness, sexual sin, and proximity to animals. And this
wasn’t just a matter of words. These images were related to Crusading
propaganda and to polemics encouraging violence against Jews. Of course,
Crusaders tried to violently eject Muslims from what they viewed as the
Christian holy land, English Christians massacred Jews in English towns, and Jewish
communities were ultimately expelled from Christian kingdoms. What we see is a
brutal erasure of nonbinary sex (both real and imagined) from individual bodies
and the wider community.
NOTCHES:
You write, in relation to one of your case studies, that ‘we know far more
about Berengaria’s anatomy than she ever likely would have wanted, [but] we
know nothing of her own perspective.’ What challenges do histories of this
kind- incredibly intimate, yet also very sketchily documented- pose to the
historian? How do you feel about the ethics of writing such histories?
DeVun:
The medieval archive, of course (and not uniquely), limits what we can know
about marginalized subjects in history, including people with nonbinary bodies
or gender practices. Berengaria, a central figure in my book, is never allowed
to speak in the archival record. Instead, we read others’ descriptions of
Berengaria’s supposed failures as a wife and a mother; we read about
Berengaria’s body as it was subjected to an extremely invasive examination to
determine whether or not she was “really” female (I use female pronouns in the
book because they’re the only ones we have in the record, and I don’t want to
impose further categories on Berengaria). Berengaria’s silence in the text is
in such poignant contrast to the enormous amount of speech generated by legal,
medical, and religious authorities about nonbinary sex during her lifetime,
speech that was little concerned with the real lived experiences of people like
Berengaria. As far as I can find, no other records about Berengaria exist apart
from this very painful, very explicit one, with which I begin my book. It’s a
difficult record to read, and I was torn about including the full text in the
book because it exposes her body – but it’s the only record like it that we
have, and my judgement is that it’s important to engage with such records while
acknowledging the ethical problems they create. What happened to Berengaria was
likely a terrible experience for her, and I don’t think it’s better to occlude
its details. People ask me: what happened to Berengaria? What was the rest of
her story? The answer is that we can’t know. We can’t recover what Berengaria
thought or wanted for herself. And since I don’t want to presume to speak for
her, what I can do is try to address the silence of that record by writing this
book – a work that reconstructs the world that she lived in and that imagines
what her story might have been.
NOTCHES:
How did you become interested in the history of sex and gender, and why did you
decide to write this book?
DeVun: I
actually started off as a premed student when I was an undergraduate student –
I loved biology and chemistry and I thought I’d be a doctor. But as I moved
forward in school, what I found was that I was more interested in the ideas
behind medical and scientific developments — the histories and social contexts
that surrounded them – than I was in clinical practice. My history and art
history classes were my favorite ones, and I started to imagine a career that could
combine my interests in science and medicine and history, and one that could
also contribute something to the issues of social justice that we were already
becoming important to me. At the time, I was doing community outreach for the
Northwest AIDS Foundation and for Youthcare, a homeless youth shelter in
Seattle, and most of the homeless teens I worked with were queer or trans. I
became acutely aware of how the distribution of political and medical power
affected the survival of marginalized people, and over time I began to turn my
mind toward a deep history of these issues.
Beyond
all of this, when I started working on this book, my partner, who is
transgender, had “top surgery,” and so questions about identity, bodies, and
classification — questions that I’ve struggled with myself – rose to the fore
of my thinking. I’ve been strongly invested in the movements for racial justice
and for queer and trans liberation over many years, and our recent challenges
and possibilities have made me think even more urgently about how history can
support our efforts in the present.
NOTCHES:
How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What
would you assign it with?
DeVun:
I’d like my book to show students that nonbinary figures weren’t rare in
history; they weren’t trivial or marginal; and they shouldn’t be only of
interest to trans, intersex, and nonbinary people now. Ideas about nonbinary
sex and gender were a part of how premodern people defined themselves as
Christian, European, male, female, or human. If we leave these nonbinary ideas
and people out of our standard histories, then we can’t see a full picture of
how any of these other categories developed either.
The
primary sources of my final chapter are a good teaching example. These images
and texts show Jesus as a physical fusion of male and female qualities. Some of
the most striking images appear in late medieval and early Renaissance
alchemical manuscripts, but we can find feminized or nonbinary-sexed Jesus
imagery in church sculpture and in a range of devotional texts (many available
in translation). They show us how nonbinary sex could be a way of thinking
about divinity, time, and transformation, as well as gender. The idea that a
variety of thinkers imagined Jesus – an inarguably central figure – as
something other than simply male is usually a big surprise for students!
NOTCHES:
Why does this history matter today? What relevance does it have to contemporary
discussions about nonbinary experiences and identities?
DeVun: I
think people assume that heated debates about gender nonconformity are
relatively new. Part of what I try to do in my book is to show that our current
conversations have parallels in the distant past, and that the past can be
revealing and important to us in many ways. First, what we might think is
obvious about sex or gender today wasn’t necessarily so for our predecessors.
We can see that common-sense understandings of sex and gender change over time,
and hence our current understandings aren’t fixed, and they’re likely to
continue to change (and can be pushed to change). On the flip side, the ways
that past societies resemble our own are important too. We can find people who
transgressed sex and gender categories even a thousand years ago. They show us
that nonbinary bodies and practices have a history. For today’s
gender-marginalized communities, this history can offer a meaningful sense of
kinship across time. And because history is a legitimating force, it can give
us the power to assert that these communities must have place in our future,
too.
NOTCHES:
What are you working on now that this book is published?
DeVun:
My first book was about prophecy and medicine during the time of the Black
Death. Given my experience this year in New York City, one of the areas worst
hit by the covid-19 crisis in the U.S., I can’t help but turn my mind to
plagues and our social and medical responses to them. I’m not sure where I’ll
go with this yet, but I’m eager to get back into the physical archives and to
work through new ideas in conversations that happen in person.
The
Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. Notches, April 20, 2021. 
Leah
DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, where she
teaches women's and gender history. She received her PhD from Columbia
University in 2004. Her first book, "Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of
Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages," was published by
Columbia University Press in 2009. She has also published several essays in
journals and edited collections, some of which have been on apocalypticism, the
resurrection, alchemy, and hermaphroditism. Her research interests lie in the
history of science and the history of gender, sex, and sexuality in medieval
and early modern Europe. She also studies the legacy of this history in the
modern world. Her current project is "Enter Sex: Hermaphrodites and the
Demands of Difference," which examines the history of sex difference by
looking at how scientists, lawyers, and religious thinkers, among others, have
conceived of sex — particularly through their approaches to people with
atypical anatomies — in the past and present.
She has
won numerous awards and has been awarded several fellowships and research
grants, including, most recently, an External Faculty Fellowship at the
Stanford Humanities Center for the 2011-2012 academic year.
Leah
DeVun on Hermaphroditism. Interview Robert Harrison. Entitled Opinions, May 9, 2012
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