Reviewed by: Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages by Roland Betancourt Luis Josué Salés Roland Betancourt Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020 Pp. 288. $39.95. Byzantine Intersectionality is driven by the author's commitment that "as historians we can use the privilege of recorded historical figures to excavate interstitial subjectivities that were denied to those less privileged" (207). Betancourt succeeds in laying the groundwork of this endeavor, producing a methodologically complex and analytically nuanced study of Roman intersectional identities that adroitly draws on material culture, sacred art, and textual corpora that few scholars can navigate with such sophistication and dexterity. On purely academic merits, Byzantine Intersectionality is a great service to scholars sympathetic to matters of social justice in relation to the excavation of the past, but who are unfamiliar with intersectional historiography. What distinguishes this book further, however, is a leveraged intervention by speaking in the interstices of its findings to contemporary power dynamics in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Benjamin Dunning's Specters of Paul (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Betancourt's book takes calculated shots at an internationally growing movement among white patriarchal supremacists to appropriate the medieval Roman empire as a symbolic imaginary of a past that, the book incontrovertibly shows, never in fact existed. Indeed, critics have questioned how truly "intersectional" this book is (seemingly with little awareness of how the application of the term has developed since Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it), while failing to notice that Betancourt demands of his readers the critical self-reflection that their own intersecting positionalities are never neutral or innocent, even in relation to this content. From this perspective, Byzantine Intersectionality doubles as a handbook for those inclined to contest imaginary lines of continuity between the Romans and those who want to appropriate them for a patriarchal white supremacist dystopia. These ethical motivations are apparent from Chapter One, "The Virgin's Consent," which examines changing Roman attitudes to sexual consent surrounding Mary's response to Gabriel's annunciation. Purely as a history of culture, the chapter is riveting in its exegesis of consent as a legal, moral, and religious category before and after Iconoclasm. Betancourt highlights differing attitudes [End Page 253] to consent, from Germanos of Constantinople's appalling suggestion that Mary would be impregnated whether willing or not (26–27), to Photios of Constantinople's belief that Mary's consenting words "enacted the Incarnation" (35), to Nikolaos Kabasilas, whose words on the matter Betancourt equates with "a modern defense of sexual and reproductive consent" (39). Indeed, the Romans were concerned about involuntary marriage and marital rape (30–31), instances where consent was "fundamentally impossible" (29), and how terminological slippage surrounding fornication, rape, and adultery had to be clarified during the Isaurian dynasty (28). So, while consent was contested in early Roman culture, in the latter centuries opinion congealed around the belief that because "humanity is remade through consent," therefore "consent is fundamental to the nature of humanity itself" (57). This discussion is closely linked to Chapter Two, "Slut-Shaming an Empress," which focuses on Prokopios's invective against Theodora in the Secret History. This chapter compellingly excavates the subjectivities it set out to find by demonstrating how technologies of reproductive self-determination were accessible in proportion to class. Contrary to public opinion, in cities like Constantinople, "we find . . . a grasp, understanding, and promotion of what we might call a woman's right to choose in reproductive and sexual matters" (78). Certainly, ecclesial and civil Roman law unambiguously condemned reproductive technologies in principle, but that hardly means they did not flourish, even under Christian physicians, such as Aetios of Amida (sixth century) and Paulos of Aigina (seventh century). Thus, Betancourt undercuts contemporary beliefs that premodern Christians categorically and unambiguously opposed reproductive self-determination. Chapter Four, "Queer Sensations," primarily develops from an art history perspective the groundwork laid by Derek Krueger and others in reference to same-gender intimacies, particularly in monastic texts. Even as a non-specialist in art history, I found the chapter compelling and accessible, but I leave further review of it to others better suited to assess it. Conversely...
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Aug 5, 2024
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