Colby Gordon, "Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
56:07 Share

Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

Your data is like gold to hackers. They'll sell it to the highest bidder. Are you protected? McAfee helps shield you, blocking suspicious texts, malicious emails, and fraudulent websites. McAfee's secure VPN lets you browse safely, and its AI-powered text scam detector spots threats instantly. You'll also get up to $2 million of award-winning antivirus and identity theft protection, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com. Cancel any time. Terms apply.

The land has been thrown into disorder. As Trump rips up the rule books, Musk breaks apart the government, and Vance offends allies. It's official. We're living through the era of the global enduring disorder. My name is Jason Pack. I'm a podcast fellow for the New Books Network and host of the Disorder Podcast.

I've seen a fair amount of disorder in my day. I lived in Libya in the late Qaddafi period. I worked in Syria and in Iraq. I've been kidnapped twice. But this is the worst I've seen. The rules-based international order that has reigned for 80 years no longer applies. So I want to bring a nerdy new books network kind of approach to understanding how did we get here?

and what can we do to restore a semblance of order to our mad, mad, mad, mad world? We will fight those powerful and nefarious forces of neoliberalism and oligarchy. We will overthrow them and restore harmony to the land. We need you, the mega-orderer, to listen and help us order the disorder. So search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now. Welcome to the New Books Network.

Hello everyone and welcome back to New Books and History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Colby Gordon of Bryn Mawr to talk about his new book, Glorious Bodies, Transtheology and Renaissance Literature, out 2024, the University of Chicago Press. Hi Colby, how are you today? I'm doing so well. It's so great to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for joining me. It's absolutely, I'm so excited to talk about the book. It's

Absolutely unexpected. When I saw the title, I was like, well, I want to read that. And I had no clue what I was going to get. And I yet still managed to be surprised. That is wonderful to hear. And, you know, it has a nice cover. So that's something. It has a nice cover. It's got nice insides, too. It is a really...

Wow. It is just a revelation of a book. Yeah, I'm thrilled. And so I'm really excited to talk to you about it. So question number one, what brought you to write this book? How did this thing happen?

You know, it was a long and winding road, as you might expect. So I was hired in 2016 into my first position as a baby professor in early modern studies. And it was an interesting time to be the first professor

trans professor in a field. So I was hired in 2016, and it was a moment where early modern studies had noticed that trans people existed sort of for the first time. It had kind of occurred to them that trans people were

were a thing. And that's because it was right around the time that gets called the trans tipping point. You remember in 2014, Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time magazine. And it was this moment of liberal optimism that

This heightened trans visibility was going to translate into trans people having rights and legal status and medical care and acceptance. And I will say that most trans people did not feel that kind of optimism, but that was the sort of mood at the time. So right around the time I became a professor of English literature and Renaissance literature specifically, um,

early modernists started asking whether there was a trans renaissance, whether trans history might have something to do with the literature and archives and texts that we study. And because I just happened to get hired in that moment, there was a certain expectation that I would do some of that work. So I started thinking about

Trans history and what it would mean to think about transition hundreds of years before the development of synthetic hormones and before the 19th and 20th century development of the language of gender identity and transsexuality and inversion and complicated taxonomies of gender and sexuality. And it seemed so obvious to me immediately that

That the way people thought about transition in the Renaissance wasn't through medicine. That wasn't really its own separate discipline anyway, but they weren't using medicine to imagine gendered change. They were using theology.

They were thinking with religion about the ways that gendered embodiment could change. And some of that involved things like readings of the book of Genesis, where Adam kind of gives birth to his clone wife, Eve, or, you know, whether Adam was actually a kind of what they would have called an androgynous or hermaphroditic figure when he was created in the image of God, who also, you

surely transcends gender or has access to every possible gender, you know, before Eve is separated out from his body. Right. Or there was a, there were conversations about whether the resurrection was going to fix our gender in some way, either by transitioning us all to male because male is the, the ideal gender to have. So surely our, our,

glorified bodies, the resurrected ones that are made perfect. Maybe they all have to be male. Or maybe they get rid of our genitals altogether because we're not going to be having babies and reproducing. We're all going to be married to Jesus. So we're not going to need them. Maybe we transcend gender entirely. So there were all of these ways that transness was embedded into some of the most sacred moments of theological history inside of Christianity.

And so I wrote a book that was thinking through the ways that religion was used to imagine transition in ways that are both affirmative and negative, for sure, for the early moderns.

And I asked what it is that we've lost by sort of giving religion to reactionary homophobic and transphobic conservatism as though religion itself were not this deep, important repository of trans thought in history.

Okay. Yeah. Great answer. I now know. Before we go any further, I want to talk about what I want to nestle this. So let's talk about the status of kind of trans studies. I don't even know if I can call it that in early modern scholarship. Where are we?

There is so much exciting work being written all the time. It is a wonderful, exciting field. But part of what was complicated for me, the task that I was sort of given, was really to introduce the existing field of trans studies to

to the also existing field of early modern studies. People have been doing work in trans studies for decades. It is a long established field. There are now, I think, three transgender studies readers, I think clocking in at something like 1,500 pages of scholarship. But for all kinds of reasons that have to do with institutional transphobia,

It has been the case until pretty recently that trans studies is a largely a quite contemporary field in its orientation and archives, you know, for reasons that make perfect sense. Again, the development of particular technologies of transition, although not all of them, you know, go back 100, 150 years. The sexological language of transness also dates to a sort of late 19th century period, which

So it's been happening for a long time. And early modernists also have been writing about gender for a very long time, really since the kind of mid 70s and early 80s, with the movement of feminist scholarship and then gay and lesbian studies into early modern studies. That has also been happening for a very long time. But.

Transness has been excluded from early modern studies in all of those kinds of initial waves of sort of feminism and gay and lesbian studies and then queer theory and gender studies entering early modern studies.

Scholars have been very invested in thinking about the histories of early modern gender and sexuality, which are weird and strange and then feel in some ways so foreign to our own understandings of them. But transness was excluded as being a kind of artifact of contemporary life.

That couldn't be addressed. It didn't have a history. And so part of what I had to do was think through the disciplinary history of trans exclusion. So part of my book is thinking through why that happened and how that happened. Okay. So, I mean, what I'm seeing here is then we've got...

early modern, I mean, early modern studies with this conception of that, we're, we're really understanding the early modern mindset, but we're thinking about, we're trying to maybe smash something down with the language of the 19th and 20th centuries. Like trans, as we understand it is modern. How can we possibly understand it in our, in an early modern construction? Right. Right. There's this, that, that,

You can also see sort of everywhere in the contemporary landscape of transphobia, there's a real assumption that transness is new. And how new we're talking depends on, you know, the talking head, really, right? It was invented 10 minutes ago, you know, or maybe it was invented in the 80s in the Netherlands, right? Or maybe it goes back to the 50s, but surely it doesn't have

a real past, the kind of past that would stretch back centuries. And that's not true. You know, there are people have always transitioned and, and,

And one of the ways we know that is they would get arrested for it. And that was as true in the Renaissance as it is today. So if you look at the records of the Inquisition, who were doing things like genital examinations to determine, you know, what if people were appropriately embodied or not.

Or if they were wearing the wrong kinds of clothes. We have records of people being criminalized and disciplined for it. But we also have records of people sort of transitioning socially and moving to a different town or joining the army or things like that. They did that as well. And sometimes those transitions were surgical. Sometimes they were medical.

People have been becoming eunuchs for something like 3000 years. You know, it's actually one of the oldest surgeries we know about. So people have been transitioning. Right. So why is it that we've been able to think about the precursors to contemporary gay and lesbian subjects?

but not the historical antecedents of trans subjects. And I think it has to do not with the non-existence of trans people or the technologies of transition. It has to do with our own assumptions about trans life.

Okay. Yeah. The trans is so new. How could we possibly talk about it? Yeah. Oh, and this is, I mean, like, laugh so you don't cry funny, but I mean, recently, do you mean there were trans people? Someone actually asked me this and she, well-meaning, there were trans, I just learned that there were trans people in Germany before the Second World War. It was like, okay, I know what we're talking about. Like, I know what thing you've just read, but oh my God. Yeah.

Yeah, and there's a scholar and historian, Morgan Page, who wrote

I think writes and, and podcasts really beautifully about the sort of recurrence of trans tipping points that trans people have this tendency to be rediscovered every couple of decades. And what it leads to is an intense fascist backlash. And you could absolutely think about sort of Germany in the 1930s about being one of those moments. Uh,

Magnus Hirschfeld and other physicians were introducing and practicing various forms of hormonal and surgical transition, and the Nazis hated it. They

And they burned his institute to the ground as the first official action of Hitler's chancellorship. You know, so we have seen this kind of pattern of rediscovery of this new exciting category of the transsexual or the trans person or whatever. And it it tends to end badly for us.

Sure. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And by us, I think we also mean, you know, trans people. Okay. But also the us that is, you know, humans. Yeah. Everybody. That's the us too. Yeah. I mean, it's a...

fear-mongering about transition and in particular this kind of fantasy that trans people are predatory and convincing children to transition or mutilating children, that is a really effective tool for fascists to enter the democratic sphere under the guise of reasonable concerns and debate.

And once they do that, once they achieve that as a kind of lever to achieve state power, then they shut down the democratic sphere entirely. Anyway, that's the subject of my second book, Transphobia and the Jewish Question. So I've been thinking quite deeply about that specific history, that conjunction between anti-Semitism and transphobia and fascism, which feels very timely.

Yeah, we're exchanging knowing looks right now. Yeah. I mean, there's also this argument just that we'll have very much the same argument that we've been having about just finding the gaze in history, too, that like the language isn't there, so it doesn't exist. Right, right.

Right. And, you know, and your book makes a very different argument. You make a very different I'm quoting here. Instead, this book insists that transition happened both socially and surgically and that the significance of such alterations was glossed through the categories provided by theology. Right. Yeah. Wow. And we're going to get into this. But glossed through theology, I want you to talk a little bit more about what you're using for your source material.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So in part, I was thinking about religious writing quite broadly.

So some of these were things like saints lives and sort of inquisitorial manuals and legal histories and biblical commentaries and sermons, but also literature, right? Because at the end of the day, I'm an English professor and early modern poetry and drama was infused with religious thought, right? It's hard to separate in a lot of ways. So I,

I was pairing the sort of literary texts with various other kinds of theological writing that were current in the moment. More rewards, more savings. With American Express Business Gold, earn up to $395 back in annual statement credits on eligible purchases at select shipping, food delivery, and retail subscription merchants, including the $155 Walmart Plus monthly membership credit and $240 flexible business credit.

Enjoy the benefits of membership with the Amex Business Gold Card. Terms apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash gold. Amex Business Gold Card, built for business by American Express. I think that this is probably surprising to a lot of our listeners or the people who aren't going to listen, that this is the rate that you're going to find, that you're looking at patently, openly, unquestionably religious sources and finding people

and finding what you're finding. Absolutely. You know, and I think this is really one consequence of secularization, essentially, uh,

the version of religion that we've inherited from early modernity has been so profoundly evacuated of the queerness and transness and strangeness of that was so much a part of early modern Christian thought. You know, I am someone who takes religion very seriously and I don't engage with

a straw man version of it. And I also don't try to sanitize it. I think that the religious categories of thinking through gender in the early modern period are radically different than our own. And there is a value in returning to the ways that people who were not heretics, people who were important people,

Christian thinkers and ministers and writers were talking about things like the Incarnation.

about the multiply gendered body of Christ, particularly at the sort of height of the passion when the incarnated body of God is opened up in a fifth wound that is described as lactating and gestating and giving birth to the church. And these are things that feel so like radical leftist innovations that

to my students often when I present it to them, but it's not me that's making that up. I am simply reading the thing that John Dunn, the Dean of St. Paul's, the most important figure in the Anglican church, except for the King, what he was saying about it. And the idea that saints and the patristics and the most central figures of Christian thought and philosophy are,

We're quite comfortable in many contexts with these sort of trans elements of their own thought. That arrives as a real surprise to readers today who believe that transness is on the side of medicine and secularism and that religion is on the side of transphobia and what they might call traditional values. But if you look at what those traditions are, they bear very little resemblance to

To, again, kind of sanitized version of Christian thought that passes itself off as traditional, but which itself is actually a radical innovation. And I mean, and I want to think about it like as conservative in a little sea, like do not like change, really kind of traditional or just reliable and, you know, and sanitized medieval Christianity is so freaking weird. Agreed.

Oh, it's so strange. And there's like in bodies don't end its skin and morals are contagious. And you're crawling in Christ's wounds when you're having, when you're meditating, like the Moravians are great curling themselves up inside the little side. Absolutely. I mean, it's, there was a comfort with embodiment in Renaissance theology that

that we have lost, that modern Christianity rejects outright. A real attention to the fluids, the blood, the tear, the bathing in them and the drinking them. Again, it feels really radical now, but it just was not. It was just part and parcel of devotional practices that

In medieval and early modern Christianity, and it is not lost on scholars working in queer theory how queer these images are, and how that sort of fantasy work of them, but it's also very trans.

And very trans and very embodied. And, you know, we also are supernatural and our magic is just so it's ethereal, right? Like when, you know, we think about a God in the sky as opposed to a God that we can touch that is walking amongst us and evil as well, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it's everywhere in the poetry and writing of the period. But there's also a negative version of transness that is also embedded in Christianity. Demons are trans. Satan is trans. Demons can take on...

Again, the word they would have used was hermaphroditic. They're sort of hybrid human-animal figures and also hybrid in terms of their sexuation. And they would take on different forms of gendered embodiment so that they could seduce and impregnate people, you know. So they were incubi and succubi, but sort of going back and forth. If you read Paradise Lost,

all of the demons in hell are various forms of trans. It's kind of incredible, but so is everyone in heaven. But that's another complicated story. Milton was very complicated in that way. You know, so there was a sense that

Transness exists in inside of Christian theology at the most important parts of the story it was telling about cosmic history, but also as a sort of negative version of a kind of demonic gender that had to be purged.

So it's both. It's absolutely both. And the point is not that it was one or the other or that religion used to be good and now it's bad. I think it's important to take it seriously and to take all of its complexity seriously as well. So it's a book that tries to think about that sort of dual nature of transition as internal to Christian logic in the 16th and 17th centuries. Yeah, I mean, that's just fundamental. You can't think through the rest of your book without just really understanding that, that

Right. That this is this is fundamental. And and, you know, that just the transcendent that the divine bodies inhabit all genders, many genders transcend gender. They're squishy and kind of just hard to get your mind around or or maybe even your fingers if you were sitting there. Right.

Or easy or frighteningly easy to get your fingers around both. Right. You know, I mean, I think that's right. I, I think there's a real metaphysical problem that theology is trying to address, which has to do with things like what is a perfect body like? Surely not like the ones we inhabit. Right.

or like them but also different in surprising and radical ways. So Milton's angels, like angels generally in the Christian tradition,

can take on whatever sex they want. So Milton's angels do it specifically so they can have the hottest possible form of sex at any given point, but their bodies are described as airy and uncompounded. You know, they can, they can simply sort of move fluidly in order to achieve the greatest form of beauty and the greatest form of sexual pleasure and

Saints often, their bodies are holy, they're Christ-like in certain ways. And often female saints often are sort of taking on not just male characteristics. Like if you think about that sort of Roman saints who are being martyred for refusing to give up Christianity, they're presented as warriors often in the Colosseum. But there are also saints who are

Seem to physically transition as part of their saintly miracles, you know? So my favorite is St. Wilgefortis who is, is supposed to be married off to a pagan King and she prays for a miracle that will prevent this marriage. And so she sprouts a beard in the morning and then they go ahead and just crucify her. And every representation I've ever seen of St. Wilgefortis is truly amazing.

Jesus in a beautiful dress crucified. So there are ways that the kind of saintly transcendence of gender isn't understood in a kind of abstract way. It's an embodied one. And the idea that we have access to a sort of divine, something that's closer to what a perfected body would look like, for Christian thought, often looks pretty trans. But trans in ways that makes them

anxious and uncomfortable too sure i i mean it's but then you have to crucify her but then that raises other questions you know so but she's also a saint and yeah i i mean and it's there this is meant to be um terrible and terrific in that kind of that yeah or safe to contemplate

Right. Or we can recuperate after the fact. This is this is often what that looks like. All right. So do you feel like we've covered the what you call the first crux? I think so. I think. OK. And so then let's move on to the second crux.

I just, I love, I cannot say enough that I love. You're like, listen, you got to get this and then you got to get this. Okay. And now I can tell you what I need to tell you. Are you up to speed breeder? Okay. Let's move on. So that's what we're doing. And we're walking and we're walking. All right. So tell me about the second crux. Remind me what the second one is. Oh, so many. Yeah.

Hold on. I'm going to... Oh, right. I'm going to pause. 26, 23. Let me pull it up. Because, of course, that would be the one time I didn't do it. Let's see your introduction. Are you having fun here? We're having a great time. I am, too. I'm having an awesome time talking about this. And you know what? I just...

you and people of your ilk, you Milton lovers, you talk about Milton and I'm like, maybe I read Milton and then I'm like, Milton is so fun. I, every time I teach Paradise Lost, I have a bet with my students that if they can find one character who's straight and cis, they don't have to write the final paper. Nope. Do it yet. I've like, just keep going. Keep looking. Uh,

God, no. I'm always like, yeah, I'm going to read Milton. And then I started to read Milton. I'm like, it's a goddamn, I know I'm not going to read Milton. Stop it. No, you won't love it. Milton is so much more queer and trans than Shakespeare, like hands down. All right. So it's your, the, the second crux trans theology, a revival, right? It starts with Kentorowitz, which I did not see coming. All right. Um,

gender has not been a central, even a secondary category of analysis. But yeah, how do I, how do I, maybe this is why I was like, just explain this to me. So I think that for early modernists, what I'm trying to do is show that religious writing, which we already understand is very queer, is also a repository of trans thought too. But again,

what I want people who work on trans studies to see as they gain access to sort of early modern texts is that we have this tendency to assume that trans life is a

by nature, a secular phenomenon, right? That in contemporary society and contemporary thought, we just take for granted that transness is a product of medical science, the imminently secular domain of medical science. What could it possibly have to do with religion?

And I want us to really think about what we're losing by giving up the powerful discourse of religion and affiliating transness with secularism. Because, first of all, trans people existed before the physicians and sexologists and psychiatrists and eugenicists invented words to describe us.

They did. And also those people are some of the worst people on Earth when you start reading their writing. And doctors are not solid allies politically to trans people. It remains implicit in much medical science that trans people are.

incapable of really making decisions for ourselves about our bodies, that we require endless amounts of gatekeeping, that we're deceptive deceivers who are trying to trick us

unsuspecting physicians into providing care for us. And I think there's a political tendency in trans activism to hide behind medical science because people don't listen to trans people, but they certainly listen to doctors. But that has proven to be a really ineffective strategy for our own political survival. And we can see the effects of that all around us. Right. So I think

Part of what I was trying to say by unearthing this particular history is that there are other ways we can imagine understanding transness, trans history, transition and trans life that don't require sort of submitting ourselves to the master discourse of medicine. All right.

So let's go through the body of the work. And I want you to just walk me through Sonnet 20. Oh, Sonnet 20 is so great. So Sonnet 20 has been this kind of amazing...

source of critical writing for hundreds of years. So if you haven't read Shakespeare sonnets recently, they open with a series that gets called the procreation sonnets, and they're understood to be addressed to someone who gets called the young man or the youth. And the first 20 sonnets are about the sort of poetic persona trying to convince this youth to have children

Because the youth is aging rapidly, like twink death is coming. And it's important to create copies of this youth because someday, you know, Shakespeare will want to date them probably. So they're very creepy. And they're just about like trying to get this person to have babies. Who does not want to have babies? Okay, so the procreation sonnet. And then sonnet 20 hits. And it is a poem that is about...

the youth's gender. And it's really interesting. It addresses the youth as a mat, as the master mistress of,

And sort of thinks through all of the ways the youth has like a woman's face and a woman's heart and is feminine and female. And the speaker can't quite figure out what's going on. And then it kind of returns to this sort of scene of the youth's creation. The poem says...

nature as she wrought these. So there's a feminine nature who's making the master mistress and kind of falls in love with her creation as she's making it. And then the couplet, which sort of is the kind of punchline, is that nature pricked thee out for women's pleasure. And

People have read this poem forever as a kind of reveal where it looks like the youth is a woman, but then you sort of like lift the skirts and you, and you see that the youth has a prick and, and that tells us exactly what the gender is. And then we understand, and then we can understand exactly how gay Shakespeare was, you know, or wasn't. And, uh,

what I talk about in this chapter is like what happens to this poem if you just know that there are trans people and it turns out it's a completely different poem if you just like are aware that people transition and that

Bodies have all kinds of shapes and genitals mean and don't mean all kinds of things. And interestingly, the word that Shakespeare uses isn't prick, it's pricking. And so I started thinking about what it would what pricking meant in that period. And it was.

It would show up in, for instance, needlework and embroidery. So what would it mean if the youth is being pricked out like a, like a woman would prick out, uh, embroidery or what would it mean if pricking was like a technology of painting frescoes? So what would it mean to like prick the youth out by like punching holes in a sheet of paper so that you can then create a kind of masterwork? And those look really different was my argument. Uh,

So it's a trans poem and it's a great one and it makes people really uncomfortable in ways that I really appreciate. And I don't want to like I don't I don't want to beat this horse any harder, I suppose. But I mean, this is but this is another place where it's been understood that Shakespeare plays with gender.

But but isn't ultimately queer, isn't there is no that it isn't ultimately trans like this is just kind of it's a it's maybe play or it's maybe just a reflection of the misogyny of the time or whatever. But this is not your argument.

No, I mean, I think, again, I tell my students all the time, like, you can just if you want to say that Hamlet is trans, you can. These are not people that exist. These are fictional characters. If you want to say if you want to say historical people are trans, that is fine. You absolutely have permission to see what happens. It is a poem. It is a work of lyrical creation.

What is it doing? Why is it so important to people to eliminate trans possibility from fiction, from poetry, from drama? What does it mean to say that a fictional character is cis? I feel like the calls are coming from inside the house at that point. It's like it's important to you as a reader not to read something as trans. That it just very clearly is. It is harder to do a reading of this poem

That is not trans than it is to do one that is trans. So I sometimes I practice the trans method of just reading what it says. And that gets me a long way. If it's the path of least resistance, go down. It is just generally my academic writing advice here too. Yeah, sure. I mean like zebras instead of, you know, horses instead of zebras on some level. It also just the smallest understanding really of just how the variety of bodies is

that exists still, but we don't talk about and certainly existed in the early modern era.

Well, or like why cis people believe themselves to be the greatest understanders of gender in history that they just know what gender is. This is a sort of afterlife of the sexological model of transness where, you know, trans people exist for cis people to do commentary on basically. And, and,

What does it mean that you think that you can know with such incredible certainty what bodies meant 400 years ago of people you never met or people who never existed in the first place? What makes you so sure that nobody could have possibly ever been trans until now? And maybe no one also is now. People are just kind of deceived.

That, to me, feels like an invitation for some self-reflection. All right. And The Duchess of Malfi? Duchess of Malfi is such a weird play. Such a strange play. I think you'll like this one because it's all about monsters and prodigies.

You know, so this is a play where sort of everybody is their gender differences and gender variance gets read through the lens of sort of human animal hybridity. And, you know, historically, I feel like every time you see a werewolf, you might as well just assume that that werewolf is trans because it does tend to be doing that kind of historically and in the present, like truly from like medieval romance forward. Right.

But I was really interested in the way prodigies showed up specifically in this play. So a prodigy is an old Roman category for a particular kind of

divine sign of the gods displeasure. And for the Romans, there were a particular set of things that sort of counted as prodigies, human animal hybrids, the birth of hermaphrodites who had to be killed lightning strikes on sacred ground, crying statues when it would rain milk or blood. I, which I also feel like I would understand to be some kind of divine portent.

And the Romans treated this sort of cluster of signs as an indication that there was something wrong socially and politically that had to be rectified. And the early moderns loved prodigies. They took them up and they Christianized them. And then they like really leaned in favor of human animal and gender variant hybrids as their ways of talking about prodigious life.

and so one of the ways that Christian thought

understood and defined the significance of gender variance was through the category of the prodigy, right? As a symptom of God's displeasure with something. Often it was either the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation or political corruption or something like that. But I think you tend to see that still today in the ways that sort of

hard right Christians will talk about the existence of trans people, both as monstrous, as semi-human or as incompletely human, but also as a symptom of God's displeasure with, you know, the decadence and degeneracy of the United States or something like that. There's a way that this feels like a really contemporary way of thinking about trans

the existence of trans people, or maybe to reframe that slightly, to me it feels like contemporary ways of talking about trans bodies as not entirely human, or what if you just identify as a goat? Does that make you a goat? Or something like that. It actually feels kind of early modern to me. It feels like an inheritance of that Christianized language of the prodigy that has to be killed so that

The state can survive. And we talked a little bit about John Donne, but I'd like to go a little further. Love John Donne so much. Tell me what you where do you want to go with Mr. Donne? So what where am I? What am I? I'm sorry.

Oh, where do I want to go with John Donne?

And then I showed him John Donne and they're like, oh, that's we're not that quick. That's that's too far. Like, what is what is he doing? What is he imagining? So the chapter on John Donne sort of moves across his massive body of literary production. So he wrote in every conceivable genre of the period. He wrote a lot of lyric poetry. Some of that poetry is secular. Some of that poetry is Christian in nature.

I talked about his sermons. He also wrote a very strange memoir of his illness, a kind of sickness memoir. He fell ill with something that might have been typhoid fever or something like that. And truly, everyone thought he was going to die, including him. And he sort of really tracked all of the symptoms and then was sort of disappointed when he started feeling better. And John Donne's poetry is really interesting to me for two reasons.

The first is that he never stops fantasizing about transition in all of his written work. In the poetry, in the sermons, he's always imagining his body moving out of or beyond gender. It's never that he's transitioning into a woman quite. It's more like he's not going to be male anymore. And the way that he imagines that

is by constantly fantasizing about his body's decomposition, which is a great subject for sermons, by the way. They must have really been crowd pleasers in a lot of ways. But he never stopped fantasizing about his body decomposing

perhaps decomposing into the body of his lover. So some of his most famous lyric poems are about this, that they were going to be buried together and like at a molecular level, they were going to become united into sort of strange, abstract forms.

embodied figures, you know, and his sermons often did the same thing that he was going to, he was no longer going to be a recognizably gendered body. He was going to be like a smooth sphere or just blasted apart and, and scattered across the entire world, you know? And so he had all of these fantasies about moving outside of gender or beyond gender or sort of escaping it. And,

People have been reading his poems for 400 years, so confused about what that could possibly mean.

And once again, I think what happens if we read those poems is just meaning exactly what they say, that he keeps fantasizing about moving beyond the he and the she, right? He keeps fantasizing about becoming one at an atomic level with his girlfriend. You know, he keeps fantasizing about moving beyond what he calls his ruinous anatomy, which is becoming bald

And he's getting a pot belly. It's masculinizing in ways that really deeply upset him. And so it's a, the, the chapter that I wrote is just about, again, kind of reading what it says about gender and how he's imagining death and resurrection as a way in

in which it's like for Dunn, the transition is already happening and he doesn't even have to do anything. He doesn't even have to say that he wants something. He doesn't even have to say that he doesn't want to be a man because in cosmic time, it's already happening. It's just a part of the process of resurrection that's going to give him one of these glorious bodies that moves outside of and beyond gender altogether.

And it's just not that confusing. Again, if you know trans people exist, feels very recognizable. It feels like there's something about these early modern writers that you're talking about that are, if not more comfortable with, at least more willing to be aware of the permeability and the transience of our bodies. Yeah.

You know, people have written about this in different ways, that they had an intimacy with illness and death that we largely don't now. You know, they didn't have antibiotics. John Donne had, I think, 14 children, of whom four survived to adulthood.

And at one point he wrote a letter to his friend. He lived in sort of grizzling poverty for a long time. And he wrote a letter that said my one of his friends that said my children are dying so fast I cannot afford to bury them, you know, and I think there was a real sense that you know.

the kind of closeness, the proximity to death and illness and decay was something they lived with in a way we really don't today. And the way he was understanding that was so embodied that

But he liked that set of that conceptual vocabulary for imagining what it meant to be in a body and to get outside of a body that he clearly felt was ruinous, was disastrous, was uninhabitable. And so for him, that kind of morbid language of death and resurrection was one he really took refuge in.

Wow. I'm just starting to think like maybe, you know, they just thought of gender very differently than we do. I think so. I in ways that both feel really recognizable and really strange and unfamiliar, which I think is the beauty of reading historically. You know, we think that we understand everything with such clarity.

And you read these texts and it is you have to reevaluate your own understanding of things like religion and gender and embodiment and death. And that's one of the true values of what it is we do as scholars of pre-modern periods is just allow people to see.

that feels new and strange and different across time. And I think that's really beautiful. Yeah, it's fabulous. And before we started recording, we were talking about the gender of the widow and eight

You know, which is just not going to make sense if you're if you're so deeply committed to like a gender binary that's set forever. I really think that that's true. And sometimes I joke that what I do is not early modern trans studies. It's early modern cis studies because people have been transitioning forever, you know, but cis people, that's a new thing.

The idea that there are two immutable genders that are a kind of bureaucratic production based on a physician's visual examination of external genitalia at the time of birth, that is that then is set in stone forever. That is a new idea, you know, and it's hard even for those of us who study trans history for a living to

to imagine anything outside of a medicalized model of gender. Going back to pre-modern periods is refreshing because it reminds us there was a time before cisness and there will be a time after it. Wow, that feels like such a great place to pull this, you know, kind of to a close.

Yeah, fantastic. So I have just my one one more question for you, which is what are you what's next? What are you building on this? What are you building with this? Like what's going on? Yeah, thanks. My next book is going to be specifically about the histories of anti-Semitism and transphobia.

going back to the early modern period and thinking through the 19th and 20th centuries. So for a very long time, including in the periods that we're talking about, one of the other places that people found gender variance was in the sort of

undefinable anatomy of Jewish bodies. So for instance, there was a longstanding fantasy that Jewish men menstruated as a punishment for killing Christ. So there were all of these ways that Jewishness is aligned with transitional bodies, with indeterminately gendered bodies. And that continues in really complex ways through the 20th century and through national socialism. And so the next book is thinking about

that particular set of convergences. Not the most uplifting topic, but one that feels quite timely to me. Wow, it feels like that's a book you should be writing. I wish you didn't have to do it. Wow. So, Colby, it has been absolutely wonderful to talk to you today. Thank you for having me.

Thanks so much. And listeners, the book is available for purchase. You can see the link on our website. And of course, your friend, the library will also have a copy. All right. Bye.