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The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200-1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define "the human" so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex.

"The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of "hermaphrodites" - as individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender binaries were called - from 200-1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define "the human" so often hinged on ideas about hermaphrodites. DeVun examines a host of thinkers-theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists-who used ideas about hermaphrodites as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. She reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of hermaphroditism in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for hermaphroditic transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were hermaphrodites; images of "monstrous races" in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly hermaphroditic outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical "correction" of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions. In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female-and human"--

This essay focuses on "hermaphrodites" to examine how ideas about sexual difference shaped the human-nonhuman distinction in medieval Europe. When constructing a definition of the human, medieval authors repeatedly pointed to a particular kind of sexual difference as a key indicator of humanness: a binary and stable sex, a singular means of reproduction, and a restricted set of possible sexual acts. The boundaries between male and female and animal and human also intersected with how medieval authors imagined boundaries between Christians and non-Christians and Europeans and non-Europeans, who were thought to possess bodily appetites that were more animal than human in nature. During the period, some European texts ascribed hermaphroditic, monstrously misshapen genitals to those living outside the geographic bounds of Europe, linking imagined deviations in anatomy to "race," a logic that was ultimately applied to Jews and Muslims, and which had a long legacy in both Europe and the Americas. This essay argues that sexual difference is wrapped up in the very taxonomy of the human-nonhuman divide. A turn toward nonhumanism — as modern scholars have proposed in an effort to queer the liberal human subject — is thus not necessarily emancipatory, and in the premodern period it was not. While this essay makes no easy equations between medieval and modern systems of sexual and racial difference, it suggests that engagement with earlier periods of history can help us to think about species difference and its connection to sexual and racial difference in contemporary contexts.

Abstract
Special issue editors Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici interview Maya Mikdashi and Carlos Motta about their collaborative film, Deseos /رغبات (Desires, 2015), which places queer and gender-variant historical characters within a fluid chronological framework. In this interview, Mikdashi and Motta discuss issues such as imperial and colonial temporality, queer networks of community, and a desire for happy endings in history.

Abstract"Trans*historicities: A Roundtable Discussion" offers reflections on how thinking about time and chronology has impacted scholarship in trans studies in recent years. Contributing scholars come from numerous disciplines that touch on history, and have expertise in far-ranging geographic and temporal fields. As a broad conversation about some of the potential possibilities and difficulties in seeking out—and finding—trans in historical contexts, this discussion focuses on the complex interrelations between trans, time, and history.