Leah DeVun. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance.

Abstract

Leah DeVun’s latest book, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance, appears at a pivotal moment in contemporary debates about transgender and intersex embodiment. As many trans antagonistic writers have opted to excise intersex and nonbinary bodies from larger conversations about sex, gender, and identity, The Shape of Sex offers a compelling rebuttal to this erasure, arguing that nonbinary bodies—a term DeVun uses to signal a wide range of bodies that fit uneasily into a premodern male-female binary—have been central to such questions for over two millennia. With careful attention to the complex and shifting ways nonbinary bodies were interpreted during the Middle Ages, DeVun eloquently demonstrates that “although intersex individuals were socially and textually marginalized, ideas about nonbinary sex were central to the fundamental categories that ordered the world” (5). Functioning as an epistemological touchstone, such bodies served divergent purposes in the Middle Ages: sometimes called upon as exemplars of “fluidity and metamorphosis,” and at other times interpreted as “hybrids that constrict and police categories” (6). This diverse history is elaborated through careful attention to the densely populated use of nonbinary figures in medieval discussions among theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, moralists, surgeons, and alchemists as well as through insights from actual nonbinary individuals. The result is a book that is exquisitely nuanced, politically shrewd, and utterly teachable.