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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance by Leah DeVun Micah James Goodrich Leah DeVun. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Pp. 315. $105 cloth; $35 paper; $34.99 e-book. The Shape of Sex had my heart racing as fast as my mind. In this spectacularly dizzying work DeVun spins a literary history of nonbinary sex from the "Adam androgyne" of early Christian theology to the "Jesus hermaphrodite" of early modern alchemy. Central to DeVun's book is the changing—and changeable—nonbinary-sexed figure. The nonbinary-sexed figure inspired medieval theologians, jurists, alchemists, surgeons, and poets in their myriad attempts to explain the divinity of the world and the bodies that make it up. The Shape of Sex moves between histories of intersex people, such as Berengaria's medical case presented to a Catalan court, and ideas about nonbinary sex that shaped premodern ideas of what it meant to be human. DeVun's comprehensive history of nonbinary imagery spans periods (late antique through early modern) and genres (popular literature, theological and legal commentaries, medical and scientific texts), and builds a new framework for approaching transgender and nonbinary history in the premodern world. Informed by critical work in trans and queer studies in fields both premodern and contemporary, this book challenges how medieval writers imagined presumed binary divisions of the world and shows that in doing this historical work we "cannot help but reenvision our own categories" (7). The approach of the book is as delicate as it is meticulous. DeVun is a methodical scholar who cares deeply about the subject material at hand. In the introduction, DeVun explains the long history of the term "hermaphrodite," used in the Middle Ages and in scholarship, to define gender-variant people. As the title demonstrates, DeVun's study is a history of nonbinary gender, which includes intersex, transgender, nonbinary, and gender-variant persons. While intersex and transgender are not synonymous, DeVun shows how the interrelation of both have often been explained by the popular mid-century medicalized term "hermaphrodite" in historical texts. Intersex and transgender people share a history of discrimination specific to bodily autonomy and health, and DeVun states that The Shape of Sex is a study that "grounds its subjects in the history of both groups" (9). Though our modern categories of gender variance fit imperfectly onto the past, DeVun shows the importance of working through premodern taxonomies of embodiment because a trans history "allows us to foreground different kinds of gender-crossings from the past, making [End Page 390] them legible and meaningful to readers now" (9). Carefully divorcing terms such as transgender from a strictly identitarian use, DeVun opts for the language of "nonbinary" as an overall term to encompass intersex, transgender, nonbinary, and gender-variant embodiments in the premodern world. The Shape of Sex offers a new hermeneutic to approach nonbinary people in medieval and early modern archives. Prior to DeVun's book, studies on intersex, nonbinary, and trans people and embodiment in the Middle Ages were few and far between. DeVun draws on several foundational studies that have charted premodern histories of intersex—Ruth Gilbert's Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories (2002) and Kathleen P. Long's Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (2006)—and sexual difference—Joan Cadden's The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (1993). Making capacious the category of sexual difference, DeVun also draws on recent collections that bring trans methodologies to medieval texts, such as postmedieval's 2018 volume on Medieval Intersex: Language and Hermaphroditism, edited by Ruth Evans, which also features DeVun's brilliant piece "Heavenly Hermaphrodites: Sexual Difference at the Beginning and End of Time." The Shape of Sex is also indebted to recent work by transgender scholars in medieval and early modern literature and history, such as Gabrielle M. W. Bychowski, a leading voice in premodern trans studies, who, alongside Dorothy Kim, recently co-edited "Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism," published in Medieval Feminist Forum. The publication of The Shape of Sex emerges at an exciting time. DeVun's book...