The Neglected Politics of Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Esoteric Writings

 

 Erotic magic, Black emancipation, gender fluidity, interplanetary spirit realms — these were but a few of the topics that preoccupied Paschal Beverly Randolph (b. 1825), an occult thinker who believed that his multiracial identity afforded him “peculiar mental power and marvelous versatility”. Lara Langer Cohen considers the neglected politics of Randolph’s esoteric writings alongside the repeated frustration of his activism: how dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.
 
Born in Five Points, Manhattan to a Black mother and a white father who left soon after his birth, Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–1875) grew up in poverty that deepened after his mother died of cholera when he was six. After a difficult, itinerant childhood, he recounts working on ships sailing between New England, Cuba, and Britain, before beginning to lecture on spiritualism and perform as a trance medium. In 1858, however, he publicly broke with the spiritualists, citing their racism, the hypocrisy of their radicalism, and their narrow view of the immaterial world. In a series of lectures, he attacked the characters of leading spiritualists, ridiculed their trances as “jugglery” (or worse, demon possession), dismissed their “business of world-bettering” as hypocrisy, and railed against some of their central tenets, such as the belief popularized by Andrew Jackson Davis that only select souls are immortal and thus all spirits are good. He concludes, “My crime was rete mucosmal”, residing in the color of his skin. Randolph relates that after a harrowing suicide attempt (or, as he explained it elsewhere, a transformative experience with Egyptian hashish), he finally left spiritualism behind.
 
While Western occultists balked at a “tawny student of Esoterics” like Randolph, they often invested their knowledge with power by racializing it, attributing its secrets to Oriental, Chaldaic, Persian, Egyptian, Asiatic, or Arab sources. Randolph trafficked in this manufactured exoticism too, but also developed a philosophically and politically complicated theory of the occult anchored in his own racialized identity. “I owe my successes,—mental,—to my conglomerate blood; my troubles and poverty to the same source”. He spent two of his most productive writing years in Louisiana, where he encountered the area’s rich African diasporic religious life. Although in one of his lectures he boasts of exposing “the whole tribe of voudeaux in New Orleans”, he also concedes “it was from one of the voudeaux queens . . . that I gained much of my knowledge”, and elsewhere he cites hoodoo and obeah practices and flaunts the secrets he learned from “the quadroons of Louisiana”. His self-identification as a “sang mêlée” — Randolph’s curiously feminized form of the colonial intellectual Moreau de Saint-Méry’s term for people with the smallest fraction of African ancestry — afforded him “peculiar mental power and almost marvelous versatility”. Because he already channeled multiple racial identities within his body, Randolph reasoned, he was predisposed to channel other identities, not of this world.
 
Although at times Randolph insisted that “not a drop of continental African, or pure negro blood runs through me”, over the course of his life he increasingly identified with the struggles of Black people. When the Civil War began, he recruited Black troops for the Union army, and during Reconstruction he worked as a teacher and agent for Freedmen’s Bureau schools in Louisiana, participated in important Black and Republican conventions, and served as a correspondent for the Weekly Anglo-African. But from within these established institutions, Randolph was also developing a subterranean praxis that he called “angular and eccentric” and which L. H. Stallings describes as that of a “funky black freak”. He founded a series of secret societies organized around his idiosyncratic interpretation of Rosicrucianism, an esoteric religious movement claiming to preserve the wisdom of a mysterious ancient order, and he dreamed of building still more. Randolph produced a huge body of writing, which he mostly self-published with his first wife, Mary Jane Randolph, and his second wife, Kate Corson Randolph, both gifted spiritual practitioners in their own right. In handbooks, pamphlets, novels, newspaper articles, manifestos, historiography, a wildly embellished memoir, printed “private letters”, handwritten manuscripts, and more, he taught curious students a kind of DIY occult practice that used their own bodies — through study, sex, and drugs — to make connections with the spirit world. But the gospel of a hallucinatory, cosmic sex magic was not an easy path for anyone in the late nineteenth century, much less a Black man. Randolph struggled against racism (which he deeply internalized), economic precarity, and an abiding sense of being an outsider his entire life. Even when it came to his own theories, he seems to have vacillated between belief and doubt. In 1875, he shot himself in the head at age forty-nine.
 
  

               Paschal Beverly Randolph’s personal motto (“Try!”) accompanying his often-reproduced emblem — featuring a                       winged globe, representing the soul, above an ancient Egyptian landscape — from the cover of Eulis! The History of                   Love (1874)

Yet in a turn of events that fulfilled some of Randolph’s grandest ambitions, after death his work helped bring about an efflorescence of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transnational occultism. Better-remembered occult groups like the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn formed in the late 1870s and 1880s and drew heavily on Randolph’s thought. The American Rosicrucian R. S. Clymer heralded Randolph as his order’s founder, although his accounts greatly simplified and regularized Randolph’s beliefs. Clymer’s Philosophical Publishing Company, the California esoteric publisher Health Research, and other occult and new age publishing companies in the United States, South America, and Europe continued to reprint Randolph’s writings throughout the twentieth century.
 
Cosmic Undergrounds
 
The details of Randolph’s cosmology changed from work to work, but they might be summed up by Fred Moten’s statement: “Fuck a home in this world, if you think you have one.” He generally believed that all beings begin as “monads”, thoughts of God that scatter over the universe like a kind of divine particulate. Some remain immaterial, and some reach worlds, including Earth, where they are embedded in rocks beneath its surface. Over a long period they materialize in a succession of geological, plant, and animal forms and finally become human souls — a trajectory leading from extraterrestrial worlds to the underground to human beings. After death, the souls travel to a vast and heterogeneous system of spirit realms — some located on belts around the planets, some in a zone that encircles all the galaxies, and others still beyond them — and arrive at a location corresponding to their spiritual development. The souls may be stuck where they land, or they may continue the process of spiritual development and move through the “middle states” of the spirit world to reach an unimaginably radiant “soul world”.
 
Randolph’s criteria for these celestial divisions varied over the course of his career. At times he delineates them in starkly racist terms, asserting that souls of African, Native American, and some Asian people inhabit the lower realms and stand little chance of leaving them. At other times (sometimes within the same text), he describes the dissolution of earthly categories in the afterlife. “Ties, blood, race, or family count for little or nothing over there”, he writes in After Death; or, Disembodied Man (1868). And in his late work, he declares that the “choice abodes of spiritland” primarily belong to people of color:
 
   “There are people of all kinds there, even “N[—]” and Sangs Melees,— lots of them too, vivat!—and the dark-hued Southern and Oriental races and peoples outnumber the Northern and fair ones in the ratio of about twelve thousand to one hundred; besides excelling them in the same degree in mind, love, knowledge, force of character, and power of soul. . . . [D]ark-hued beings . . . constitute the population of the heavens proper.”
 
In his descriptions of the spirit realms, Randolph’s racial thought oscillates excruciatingly between replicating the earthly categories that thwarted him and creating a world unto itself. In these latter instances, the spirit realms offer not only an exit from white supremacy but an eternity of redress, which gathers people of color from all over the earth to enjoy dominion beyond it.

               Photograph by George McCuistion of Juneteenth celebrations in Corpus Christi, Texas, 1913

 
Randolph pictured the spheres, divisions, zones, and sections of the spirit world in elaborate detail, including their distinctive environments, architecture, and cultural institutions. The appearance of each sphere, he explains, corresponds to the spiritual development of its inhabitants, because they are a “projection” from the “souls who dwell together and create their own scenery and surrounding”. Randolph means this quite literally: in the spirit worlds, “each thought possesses an inherent vitality of its own, as also form, proportion, and coherence”; in short, spirit worlds are made of palpable ideas. As such, they contain both familiar forms of animal life and “entirely different” ones that embody “some salient and positive love, principle, or affection”. Human souls look like earthly people but instead of blood, “only a pure, white, or colorless electric current” courses through them. They wear clothes and have no bad teeth or saliva. They move through space using magnetism. They have buildings, cities, schools, art, music, and more “fun” than we do. They also have better sex, for “up there, and there only, can its deep mysteries be fully known, its keener joys be felt!” Souls do get married, but these marriages do not depend on “justice, parson, or priest”, and they “last just so long as the parties thereto are agreeably and mutually pleased with, and attracted, to each other, and no longer”.
 
Looking for language to describe the relation between our familiar world and the mysteries of the spirit realms, Randolph reached for the subterranean. Specifically, Randolph envisions the interplanetary spirit realm as this world’s underground. Through occult study and practice, he promises, one could cultivate “the ability, by self-effort or otherwise, to drop beneath the floors of the outer world, and come up, as it were, upon the other side”. Randolph reused the phrase “to drop beneath the floors of the outer world” multiple times in his writings to describe practical occultism; its image of the spirit world’s simultaneous proximity and exteriority to everyday life seems to have resonated with him. But he also used the image of the underground to explain that the spirit world was interior, buried within a person’s soul, because the “abysses, labyrinths, and most secret recesses of your being” themselves hold a microcosm of the universe. To be clear, for Randolph, these subterranean regions of the soul are not a metaphor. They are an actual portal. Randolph charts their egress to unknown worlds in the first half of Dealings with the Dead: The Human Soul, Its Migrations and Its Transmigrations, which is narrated (through the medium of Randolph) by a disembodied soul named Cynthia Temple. After dying, Temple recounts how the “soul-principle” within her “rapidly sunk down into one of the profoundest labyrinths of its own vast caverns”:
 
  “Down, down, still lower and deeper into the awful abyss of itself it sank, until at last it stood solitary and alone in one of its own secret halls. The outer realm, with all its pains and joys, cares, sorrows and ambitions, hopes, likes, antipathies and aspirations; all its shadows and fitful gleams of light, were left behind, and naught of the great wide world remained.”
  
Having descended into her own soul, Temple then finds herself in the “Soul-world”, an inconceivably beautiful place of heightened sensory experience where she joins her fellow spirits, including an ancient Egyptian king and Rosicrucian with the enviable name Thotmor, who becomes her lover. This “boundless realm of mysteries”, as Randolph described it elsewhere, reveals earthly existence to be simply “the outer realm” of unimaginably greater, unguessed worlds.
 
Sex Magic Collectives
 
At the same time he was conceptualizing occultism in subterranean terms, Randolph was also working hard to build occultism into an underground movement. As he moved around the United States, propelled by hardship and restlessness, he founded a series of secret societies devoted to his interpretation of Rosicrucianism: the Supreme Grand Lodge of the Triple Order in San Francisco in 1861, the Rosicrucian Club in Boston in the late 1860s or early 1870s, the Brotherhood of Eulis in Nashville in 1874, and another incarnation of the Supreme Grand Lodge — now of the Triplicate Order — in San Francisco in late 1874. The precise relationships between these organizations remain unclear, but Randolph framed all of them as alternatives to the mainstream spiritualist circles that mistreated him. “Ostracized by those for, and with whom I had labored since 1848; met with ingratitude at every step, I gladly accept the ostracism of the many for the good companionship of the few”, he declared, “yet not so few after all, for day by day . . . our Brotherhood of Thinkers has increased”. Randolph’s swelling “Brotherhood of Thinkers” was probably fantasy. None of the lodges seems to have lasted more than a few months, and Randolph’s biographer John Patrick Deveney wonders to what extent they existed at all.

          Charter for Randolph’s Triplicate Order of Rosicrucia, Pythiane, and Eulis, supposedly founded in San Francisco, 1874

 
 In addition to founding secret societies, Randolph sought to construct a virtual occult underground through a sub-rosa body of writing, offered through mail-order, that his more widely available publications hinted at but could not themselves contain. In interpolated statements, footnotes, and publishers’ advertisements, Randolph promoted a shadow repertoire: pamphlets, “privately printed letters”, handwritten manuscripts, formulas, and correspondence disclosing secrets that “cannot well be printed in [a] book”. Texts like “The Golden Letter”, “The True Oriental Secret”, “The Ansairetic Mystery”, “The Mysteries of Eulis”, and “The Golden Secret!” showed readers how they could use their sexuality — in combination with a good diet, drugs (namely hashish), devices like magnets and mirrors, mental concentration, and study — to exercise their paranormal capacities.
 
Randolph may have run his clandestine mail-order business for profit, although the prices of most texts were so low (or in some cases, nonexistent) that this motive seems insufficient. It’s also possible that Randolph created it in order to avoid scrutiny, particularly after New York passed a state law prohibiting the sale of obscene materials in 1868, which in turn prompted Anthony Comstock to lobby Congress successfully to outlaw the distribution of obscene materials through the US mail in 1873. The fact that Randolph was a Black man writing about sex probably would have made him a particular target of state authorities; the fact that he was a Black man writing about how sex might “revolutionize the globe” could only have compounded his danger. Randolph may also have concluded that such subterranean writing offered the best way to reach the “democratic underlayer of society”, where he believed true sexual knowledge belonged, and to circumvent the media dominance of “the upper strata”, whose “newspapers by myriads” spread “gross and culpable non-knowledge” about “all the vital points that cluster around the one word ‘sex.’” But beyond being instrumental, the relation between the underground circulation of Randolph’s writings and their sex magic content seems reciprocal: underground circulation heightens their occult capacity.
 
Randolph often explicitly addresses his writings about sex to the personal needs of heterosexual married couples, but this address is at odds with the powers he ascribes to sexual activity, as well as with the capaciousness of his ideas about gender and sexuality. “I believe in love, all the way through”, he declared, “and while I live will help every man, woman, and the betweenities to win, obtain, intensify, deepen, purify, strengthen and keep it, and I will help all others to do the same. There! That’s me! I mean it!” He deemed earthly gender identity as “provisional,—that is, limited to a given arc of the universal polygon of souls’ duration”, while God is both male and female in his account.

 
 
Diagram from Magia Sexualis (1931), translated by Maria de Naglowska, depicting one of the five positions a couple must assume during “the operation of sexual magic for the prayer of love”. Once thought a forgery, Magia Sexualis is now believed to be a compilation of different works by Randolph, interspersed with Maria de Naglowska’s own theories

 
Accordingly, while Randolph taught both “feminine” and “masculine” occult practices, these correspond not to the practitioner’s gender identity but to the types of power they exercise. The entire universe, he held, was organized around male and female forces, but he saw earthly notions of physiological sex difference as a ruse: “[I]t don’t follow that all who wear the Penis are in soul true males, or that a vagina is the sign of womanness”. Randolph’s conception of what Benjamin Kahan calls “misattuned bodies and souls” leads Kahan to identify him as “the first theorist of inversion”, the late nineteenth-century sexological theory that explained same-sex desire as a matter of being externally one sex but internally another. But I am less sure we can fold Randolph’s ideas into the taxonomies of sexology. His ideas about sex exceed inversion’s binary model, extending to the “betweenities”, mutability, and the possibility of holding multiple sexual subjectivities simultaneously in a single body. Moreover, his sweeping rejection of physiological sex differs markedly from sexology’s attempts to reify it, stigmatizing “perceived sexual ambiguity” through “a tendency to racialize it”, as Siobhan Somerville observes. Randolph seems not to be thinking in the emerging terms of modern sexuality so much as working out an erotic praxis that lies both in their shadow and on an entirely different plane.
 
Randolph also departed from the most prominent sexual dissident movement of the day, free love, which by the late nineteenth century was dominated by individualist anarchists who saw sexual freedom as an expression of individual sovereignty. Instead, Randolph called back to an earlier incarnation of free love, the Fourierist utopian communities of the 1850s, where “passional attraction” organized new forms of erotic and social life. More specifically, Randolph’s theory of sex amplified his theory of mediumship, which he believed did not involve yielding oneself to the direction of a spirit (as most spiritualists supposed) but was instead a “strange blending”, by which the medium could hold “mixed identities” in a single body. Both these theories, in turn, seem homologous to Randolph’s belief that his position as what he called a “composite man” (i.e., racially mixed) specially qualified him for acts of supernatural communion. Sex offered the most expansive possibilities for such communion because “soul-power and sex-power are co-efficients and co-dependents”. By cultivating their sexual capacities, practitioners could become connected to celestial forces and harness their “power, knowledge, energy”. But this can happen “only at the moment, the very instant, of the holy, full, mutual and pure orgasm, or ejection of the three fluids and two auras—i.e., prostatic, seminal, and female lymph or lochia”. Mutual orgasm, in other words, opens a momentary pathway to the cosmos, enabling humans to connect with spirits.
 
Randolph’s sex magic promises an array of earthly benefits, including heightened pleasure, physical health, guaranteed love, the empowerment of women, and the production of intellectually superior children. But in his subterranean publications he reveals that its real value goes beyond this. “Churches and marriage exist as repressions, — our system in expansion”, he asserts in “The Asiatic Mystery”: “Love forever, against the world!” Once adepts cultivate their latent powers, he predicts they will “revolutionize the globe”, “bidding farewell to many of [the] modes, moods, opinions, sentiments, thoughts, and procedures” of current civilization and ushering in “a new epoch of human history”.

                          Frontispiece and title page for a 1930 reprint of Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Eulis! (1874)
 

Randolph’s Black Revolutionary Prophecies
 
Randolph’s occultism is both so totalizing and so out there that it can seem utterly disconnected from earthly events. Yet his most prolific writing years were also a period of intense political activism, when he was recruiting Black soldiers for the Union army, helping found the National Equal Rights League, teaching in and advocating for Freedmen’s Bureau schools in Louisiana, participating in various Colored Conventions, and lecturing and writing in support of these endeavors. John Patrick Deveney describes this work as “almost entirely removed from Randolph’s usual occult concerns”, and other scholars have likewise tended to consider his occultism and political activism as separate tracks in his life. But references to anti-Black violence and scenes of Black liberation materialize in his occult writing like its own attendant spirits. These moments invite us to consider the politics of Randolph’s occultism, particularly in light of the repeated frustration of his political activism, and to read his dreams of “upheaving the world” and joining other worlds alongside the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.
 
To get a sense of the connection between Randolph’s occult undergrounds and his post-Emancipation politics, consider the migration of a phrase that recurs throughout his writing: “We may be happy yet!” In Randolph’s occult works, this is an expression of esoteric knowledge: it appears in the mouths of all the spiritually gifted characters and as the “formula” of the occult secret society the Mysterious Brotherhood in The Wonderful Story of Ravalette; he identifies it as his own “motto” in another novel, Tom Clark and His Wife; and he uses it as the finale to the second part of Eulis! But in between these works, Randolph reused the phrase in another context: the 1864 National Convention of Colored Men in Syracuse. The convention, which led to the founding of the National Equal Rights League, gathered a who’s who of the leading Black political voices of the era, including Frederick Douglass, who was elected president, Henry Highland Garnet, William Howard Day, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, J. W. C. Pennington, John Mercer Langston, William Wells Brown, Peter Clark, and Jermain Loguen. One wonders how the other delegates received Randolph. He had earned a reputation as a provocateur in antislavery meetings, often more concerned with proving his own “angular and eccentric” character than aiding the movement. Even as he wrote eloquently about his alienation from white people, he sometimes seemed actively to alienate himself from Black people. At the same time, what room did the National Convention of Colored Men’s resolution to “promote everything that pertains to a well-ordered and dignified life” leave for a sex magician?
 
Over the next five years — as the war ended, Reconstruction began, and Randolph moved south to take part in it — he developed a new vision of a revolutionary destiny for Black people. After Death; or, Disembodied Man (1868), his fullest account of “the worlds of disbodied, unearthed peoples”, builds to a prophecy of world-shattering upheaval. The “disbodied, unearthed peoples” to whom Randolph refers are technically the spirits of the dead in the afterlife. But the adjectives’ peculiar negative construction, which implies something done to peoples, and the word peoples itself, with its connotations of group rather than individual identity, also evoke the situations of Black people in “the afterlife of slavery”, to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s phrase — an association reinforced by references to racial violence that thread through the book. Randolph wrote After Death while working for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana, where he first taught in New Orleans and then tried to build new schools in the countryside to the west, chronicling his experiences for the Anglo-African Weekly and the Religio-Philosophical Journal. The work was extremely dangerous. Randolph was in New Orleans on July 30, 1866, when a mob of armed white men, backed by the police, attacked a march of Black and white Radical Republicans and their supporters in what would be known as the New Orleans Massacre. “If hell is any worse than New Orleans, I pity the damned”, he informed the New York Tribune, and in the countryside it was little better. The writer Edmonia Goodelle Highgate, who was teaching just fifteen miles from Randolph, recounted that white supremacists shot at her and her students, and “the rebels here threatened to burn down the school and house in which I board before the first month was passed”.

 
 
              Thomas Nast, The Massacre at New Orleans, 1867. The political cartoon criticizes President  Andrew               Johnson, dressed as a king, for allowing the New Orleans Massacre of 1866 to unfold, wherein white rioters attacked a peaceful demonstration of Black Freedmen. Nearly 50 people were killed and almost 200 injured
 
 

While the politics of Randolph’s other writing often remain below the surface, he explicitly frames After Death’s ideas in the context of his work for the Freedmen’s Bureau and especially the experience of being terrorized by white supremacists. He explains that these circumstances shaped his conceptualization of the book:
 
“[F]or weeks together, I was obliged to sleep with pistols in my bed, because the assassins were abroad and red-handed Murder skulked and hovered round my door. Daily threats of summary strangling seasoned many of my meals, while writing out the first edition of this revelation, the offense being that, under the orders of my Country’s officers, I taught some thousands of “negroes”—black and white too,— the sublime arts of reading and penmanship. And yet the work laid out was accomplished then,—finished now.”
  
Reminders of the book’s conditions of production pepper the text, abruptly transporting the reader from the resplendent landscapes of the spirit worlds to the grim scenes of this one: “I am, at the writing of the first edition of this book, here in the carpenter shop of Auguste Landry, in St. Martinsville, St. Martin’s Parish, Louisiana, May 12, 1866”; “I am in this barn in St. Martinsville, penning the lines now before the reader’s eye”. These uncanny conduits between St. Martinsville and the soul realms suggest that Randolph’s visions of life beyond the grave may reflect his efforts to imagine a line of flight out of this world.
 
In the second half of After Death, Randolph takes this fantasy a step further, picturing not only an exit from this world but the “upheaving” of it. The world upheaval is literal and terrestrial as well as social. He notes that in his 1863 historical-theological-geological study Pre-Adamite Man, he had argued that the prehistoric world was rocked by a cataclysm in which “the molten mass in the earth’s bowels became disturbed, and it vomited forth . . . fire and flame from a hundred volcanic mouths”. But since he wrote that book, he adds — which is also to say, in the five years since the Emancipation Proclamation — “I have become convinced that we are liable to such a catastrophe” occurring again “at any moment”. He predicts that soon “a family of asteroids” will strike the earth, which “will cause the northern pole to sink and the southern one to rise”, tilting the planet dramatically on its axis. “Terrific storms, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions” will follow; whole sections of the earth “will sink and again be thrown up”, and “mountains and mountain-ranges will be leveled”. In this tumult, “earth’s bowels will be completely out-turned”, and “gold, silver, precious stones, and metals will be thrown to the surface in quantities that will forever bar them as standards of value”.

  
John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, oil on canvas, ca. 1853. The painting is thought to have been inspired by Revelation 6
 

1863 carte-de-visite depicting the events of December 31, 1862: the still-celebrated Watch Night, when “enslaved and free African Americans gathered, many in secret, to ring in the new year and await news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect”

 
Millenarian prophecies were not uncommon in the late nineteenth century, but After Death is distinctive for the way it frames apocalypse with the author’s experiences of white supremacist violence. These incidents, along with Randolph’s new conviction that “we are liable to” apocalypse, seem to tie the earth’s imminent upheaval to the continuation of Black unfreedom after Emancipation. Notably, the forthcoming cataclysm, and the better world it ultimately inaugurates, coincides with a literal emergence of the underground. When Randolph concludes, “The earth is gestating new and better children: fearful will be her parturition; but joyous will the family be!”, he imagines the earth’s gestation as the quickening of forces within it that will forge new communities above it.
 
We might read After Death’s vision of the earth turned inside-out as also imaging Randolph’s conception of the occult underground: contiguous with the extraterrestrial, “against the world”, in his words. Yet by the time Randolph issued a revised edition of After Death five years later, this vision of extraterrestrially induced, seismic cataclysm had vanished. He rewrites the prophecy to predict instead a future of “modified republicanism” in the United States, anchored in racial segregation. He asserts that “Indians” and “the unfortunate mixed race” are destined for “extinction”, white Americans will “dictate laws to the habitable globe” (but benignly), and “the nation will give the negro a vast territory freely”. Before the end of 1875, there will come “a literal and unprecedented outpouring of the Spirit (world)”, “especially in the Southern States among the blacks, who will, with almost a frenzied zeal, march off to their Zion in the south-west”. “If I am in the body on that day, I will be their Peter the Hermit, and cast my lot with theirs”, Randolph vowed.
 
   “The new empire and the new civilization yet to come out of that poor yet rich and mighty people is destined to be as great in peace and spiritual goodness, as their masters have been in intellect and war. In that new Zion, Science will erect her halls and Art shall build her schools; and in them African genius, untainted for the cuticular hue, God’s doings, not theirs, shall pursue the triumphs of investigation. Ay! And by its warmth and fervor open new doors to the mysterious realms above and around us, that the colder white can never penetrate; and thus the black shall add his quota to the common stock of human knowledge, and the word Justice will have a meaning in this world.”
  
The apocalyptic fervor and subterranean upheaval of the 1867 edition have dropped out, replaced by the prospect of a spiritually developed Black colony. We might see Randolph’s faith in Reconstruction in this vision. But it is hard not to hear despair in his prediction of white global rule, however peaceful; the eradication of Indigenous and multiracial people; and the relegation of Black people to the desert to commune with “the mysterious realms above and around us”. Concluding that “the races can never live side by side on equal terms”, Randolph looks toward a colonization project, directed by the US government, that strongly resembles the efforts of the white-led American Colonization Society to send free African Americans to West Africa in the early nineteenth century. As the frontier replaces the underground, Randolph no longer contemplates destroying the world to remake it; he just wants to be left in peace. In this attenuated future, “justice will have a meaning in this world” not when it is upturned, but once Black people “open new doors” into other ones.
 
This essay is excerpted and adapted from Lara Langer Cohen, Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham and London: 2023).  Duke University Press, 2022.
 
The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician : Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics. By Lara Langer Cohen. The Public Domain Review, February 8, 2023.

Duke University Press

What does it mean to “go underground”? Lara Langer Cohen is an associate professor of English at Swarthmore College. Her latest book, Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2023), explores how subterranean spaces (both real and imagined) animated social, political, and cultural movements in 19th century America, from the abolitionists of the Underground Railroad to anarchist secret societies and practitioners of sex magic. In this conversation, we plunge into these underground worlds and excavate some of the lost people and ideas that populate the places that exist beneath our collective history. 

Nostalgia Trap is a podcast and video series on American history, radical politics, pop culture, and apocalypse, created and hosted by David Parsons.

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 348: Going Underground w/ Lara Langer Cohen. January 31, 2023.

Leah DeVun on Premodern Nonbinarity

 

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

 

Leah DeVun website

Columbia University Press

De Gruyter