Mariana Bodnaruk

This project analyzes the social and cultural role of gender-crossing figures in the premodern Eastern Mediterranean studying transgender narratives and art c. 150–1500 CE. Trans saints presented hagiographers and artists with a challenge. How could gender marginalized people achieve the standards of Christian piety, let alone saintly behavior? In portraying their fictional protagonists as exempla of masculine virtues in the context of Palestinian monasticism, the authors of the anonymous trans lives, as well as iconographers, highlight the non-binariness of social identities in Byzantium, unsettling fixed gender categorization. Conceiving a trans figure of an ascetic subverting conventional binaries, the texts and images create a model for incorporating non-conforming masculinities of Byzantine society within the normative hagiographic and iconographic genre. Ideas about nonbinary sex and gender were a part of how premodern people defined themselves as Christian, male,
female, or human. This project of transgender history aims to shed light on how these foundational categories developed, anticipating our own. By turning to the past which introduces us to radically different cultures we are enabled to imagine radically different futures for ourselves too.