Wear Your Advocacy Wave 3: Transgender, Queer, Crip, and Feminist

“Nature goes to her coffer and opens it up. She has at least a million molds there, and she has very great need of them, for if she had only one form everyone would be alike that no one would ever be able to tell who was who or what their name was"

Roman de Silence
Heldris of Cornwall

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Transliterature Online Store

Transliterature Online is proud to announce new arrivals to the online store. Following an initial limited run of an assortment of button designs, including (Wave 1) "Mad for Margery," "Queer Gower," and "A Trans Middle Ages Matters," and (Wave 2) "Make the Middle Ages Accessible," "She Called Herself Eleanor" and "They Called Me the Loathly Lady Before I Was Nasty," more styles and items are finally coming. Wave 3 will continue to hit medieval crip, feminist, trans, and queer buttons, now featuring, "Medieval Disability Studies," "Medieval Transgender Studies," "Queer Medieval Studies" and "Feminist Medievalist." All proceeds from the sales will still go to funding important charities, starting with the Transgender Travel Fund run by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship that brings trans scholars to important medieval conferences. This scholarship is important both for its symbolic and practical investment in a more inclusive future of the past.

After initial sales at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, we are doing a restock in order to send buttons via mail to those who were not in attendance. If sales continue to hold steady, in future conferences I will continue to try out new designs as well as some of the old, so everyone who wants to donate and get a button can. Likely, there will start to be designs exclusive to specific events, available only at the conference. Again, even if this is a temporary experiment, Transliterature is proud to be able to facilitate funding toward some great causes and working with you to build advocacy for important issues. Thank you for your investment and interest!

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Wear Your Advocacy

Wave 3

"Medieval Disability Studies" Button 

(2.5 inch single or 10 pack)

"Medieval Transgender Studies" Button 

(2.5 inch single or 10 pack)

"Feminist Medievalist" Button
(mini and 2.5 inch single or 10 pack)

"Queer Medieval Studies" Button 

(mini and 2.5 inch single or 10 pack)

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CFP Kalamazoo 2019: Dysphoric Pedagogies: Teaching About Transgender and Intersex in the Middle Ages (Due Sept 10)

"Earlier this year, UNESCO published a series of studies which showed how gender nonconformity lies at the core of both LGB and T discrimination in schools. Obviously, this also applies for intersex students. Sex education and the school environment tends to perpetuate the notion that only two sexes exist. "

The Global Alliance for LGBT Education

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Dysphoric Pedagogies: 

Teaching About Transgender and Intersex in the Middle Ages 

Organizer: Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski 

(Case Western Reserve University) 

Co-Sponsor: “the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)” 

and “the Teaching Association for Medieval Studies (TEAMS)” 

Questions about transgender and intersex in the Middle Ages are nothing new in scholarship and especially not within classrooms. Students have long seemed curious about all the non-binary and non-cisgender lives that populate the syllabi of pre-modern seminars, sections and surveys. Hands can shoot up from wondering students when reading about the isles of Hermaphrodites or Amazons, sainted monks who started their life living as women, ambiguous figures like Chaucer’s Pardoner, and fictional stories like Roman de Silence or historical personas such as Joan of Arc. Whether or not we consider ourselves intersex or transgender studies scholars, as instructors of pre-modern eras we wrestle with such questions about how to respond to students who are excited to connect the gender diversity they see in their world with the images and stories they are reading about in the distant past.

This panel aims to offer a range of pedagogy techniques, lesson plans, assignments, reading lists, and anecdotes for all those interested in enhancing how they teach about transgender and intersex in the Middle Ages. The concept of “Dysphoric Pedagogies” is drawn from the DSM-5 diagnostic language that describes the experience where one’s identified or expressed gender conflicts with the gender assigned by society. Within the modern world there are many ways to experience dysphoria and there are trans, intersex, and non-binary who do not experience this conflict. We want to hear about your valuable experiences in teaching through such instances of dysphoria within the art, history, and literature in an era before the DSM-5 and its various diagnoses, or the coinage of the words “transgender” or “intersex,” How have these moments of gender diversity and conflict provoked conversations about self and society, expression and audience, nature and nurture, gender norms and non-conformity, past and present? Each presenter is recommended to consider how you’ve engaged with the resonance between medieval figures and the long history of trans, intersex, gender queerness and non-binary gender. Abstracts should be 250-500 words.

Send abstracts to Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski (Gabrielle.Bychowski@Case.edu)

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The Future of Medieval Transgender Studies: Kalamazoo 2018

"It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,

 a step along the way"

Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw

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The Loathly Lady of Medieval Studies

A knight stands trial before a court of female identified and allied persons, begging for his future and calling in his defense the aid of a sometimes elfin maiden, sometimes loathly lady. This queer maid-crone gives the knight insight into the mystery of futurity and women: liberty. Granting also, the knight has also been told the other demands of this medieval society of females: riches (i.e. pay us), honor (i.e. treat us with dignity), lust, joy, and rich array (i.e. let us have fun and express our bodies as we will), flattery (i.e. treat us like we know what we are talking about, maybe even cite us), and marriage (i.e. make commitments to us). But in the end, liberty is what wins the knight his future but only if he is willing to fulfill his oath to this nasty woman. The court of femmes agree and the knight gives lip service to this foul Wight. Later, in private, the knight seeks from the woman what exactly such a commitment means. What is their future together going to look like? Well, she replies, that is up to you: either I will be ugly but committed, i.e. the crone, or beautiful and uncommitted, i.e. the elf.

This is the story the Wife of Bath tells in the Canterbury Tales but it is also, I believe, the story of this session. The knight of medieval studies wants to know what it’s future looks like, the court of women and allies, or society for the study of medieval feminist studies, has given demands but now the knight of medievalism finds new potential futurity in the Wight that has been sometimes treated as an ugly crone and sometimes flirtatiously as an unspeakable desire, medieval transgender studies. Within the confines of this court and session, there seems to be some commitment, words towards a shared future. But the question of what kind of future remains. Is the Wight of medieval trans studies to be forced to pass under the beauty standards of this predominantly patriarchal and sometimes abusive knight leading her to inevitably stray from and resist him? Or will the field be grim faced but committed? Both options are on the table as well as the choice that the knight does choose and medieval studies should as well: liberation.

In identifying the sometimes loathly sometimes elf maiden in the Wife’s Tale with medieval trans women and medieval trans studies, I make a claim about the enmeshment of the medieval and the trans which many would like to keep separate. Transgender may exist out and honestly but should do so over there, in modernity, only flirtatiously visiting the medieval homestead when the knight’s lusts dare have fun with us, maybe even make jokes about us in satirical conference papers about eunuchs. Indeed, we have seen this been the case, with medieval studies of sexuality, some performed by our queer friends and forerunners, which flirt with the trans but ultimately noncommittally and tangentially. Or else trans scholars and studies will be claimed and committed to as a member of the medieval household but only as a killjoy diversity subgroup, that one Wight that is here but still doesn’t have full commerce with all the beautiful people. And either choice, keeping us proud and at a distance or close but begrudging, functions to keep the medieval medieval and keep transgender transgender. 

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Cistory

(Cisgender Versions of History)

Cis queer historians have likewise followed the impulse of the knight in un-trans-ing medieval transgender in order to make them queer sodomites, best unknowable and unspeakable. One such queer scholar once claimed to “look through and not at the transvestite.” Indeed she does, never once using any trans word besides this claim to look through transvestism, as her primary focus is the queer unspeakability of sodomy. Eleanor’s gender, she claimed, is as unknowable as her sin and sexuality. All of this unknowability, she concludes, is very queer. I am not here to contest that there is something very queer about medieval transgender but to say that medieval trans-ness is unknowable is to intentionally un-know all the ways that such trans-ness names itself and tells its story. At times, such as in the case of Eleanor Rykener, she may be forced to reveal details of her life, like her deadname, she otherwise would not disclose. Yet she uses her detection as a way of resisting the cis and queer impulse to uncover and un-trans her.

Like Eleanor, By being accosted, captured, and detected first by medieval cisgender men and later by cisgender historians, our loathly lady becomes exploited, limited, and un-trans-ed in order to provide a momentary playful release to cisgender systems that will proceed on despite the transness in the archive. Indeed, by overwriting or unwriting this trans-ness, the medieval cisgender men and the cisgender medievalists create then compound the dysphoria in the archive by contradicting the multivalence of identified and expressed gender with a gender assigned to her by society then history. Eleanor becomes a sodomitical cross-dressing cis male and the Wight becomes an ugly old woman or else a somewhat queer elfin cis woman. At times the impulse to un-trans medieval figures may make allowances, such as defining the Wife of Bath by her tale by saying the teller is a strong and thereby masculine woman or describe Rykener by the double-billing as John/Eleanor that limits Eleanor to at best co-equal with John. 

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Dysphoria in the Archives

These figures embody the un-trans-ing and unknowing of trans-ness that leaves the baseline foundational assumption going into medieval studies the belief that of course such medieval persons were not transgender. Indeed, this insistence on having our cake and eating it too is exactly the conflict is the DSM-5 definition of dysphoria. The Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM-5) short definition of gender dysphoria is: the “marked difference between the individual’s expressed/experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her.” I draw attention to the fact that the disorder, dysfunction, and distress is social and not individual. The problem is not that a person is transgender. The problem is that the cisgender society accosts, captures, and un-trans-es the transgender person. Dysphoria begins in the environment, dysphoria begins in cisgender people, then is transmitted into transgender bodies where is does wreckage to lives, destroying transgender pasts, transgender presents, and transgender futures.

This is dysphoria the price of either treating transgender studies as a modern field we may invoke on occasion playfully and unfaithfully, not doing our due diligence to her, or else as a diversity box we check begrudging but otherwise ignore and isolate, occasionally giving lip service to when forced to be a court of women or a society of medieval feminists. Dysphoria is the personal internalization of a social division that is willing to make exceptions but otherwise will not transform the fundamental division of male and female, medieval and trans studies. And notice, the dysphoria may not be named as such until the trans figure makes itself known but the conditions in society that produce this dysphoria, the divisions in the field and in the archives pre-exist and may even outlast a loathly lady standing up in a session pointing them out. Because these divisions are nonetheless about the control and subordinacy of cis men and women, even though it is currently trans, queer, and non-binary people and studies feeling the beating stick.

As a primarily social event between people rather than a strictly internal psychological event, dysphoria can then be detected in the field and in the archives, especially archives that deny trans identification or expression. Dysphoria is a disorder in cisgender societies and archives that demands transgender interventions to repair, to liberate, and to re-narrate. This session then is both a call for and an enacting of such a reparative, liberating, and retelling. In not only to see in these papers how we might attend to the way that the medieval cis order and medievalist cis histories have created dysphoria in the archive by learning lessons on how to transform the future of the past by transforming compulsory cisgender lives and stories. Dysphoria in the archive teaches us the need to trans(form) queerness that reifies the cisgender order by un-transing our past, thereby threatening our present. Because the root of dysphoria is the cisgender desire to not see transgender, then or now. The future of medieval transgender studies may begin the process of liberating cis folk from their ingrained ignorance.

So how do we affirm rather than accost, liberate rather than capture, and deepen rather than uncover medieval transgender and dysphoria? How do we diminish and reclaim the dysphoria in the archive towards a positive pre-modern transgender studies? I argue that the Wife of Bath’s Tale, specifically the loathly lady already shows us the way by how she turns back on the cisgender order. First, consider how the Wight responds to the knight accosting her. If she is going to be exploited, she demands to be paid before she consents. In historical terms, this is to say that historians must let the trans people speak and consent to how we use their stories. Let trans persons of the past and their allies today set their terms. Thus, if we are to tell trans histories then we must listen to trans voices. Educating, accepting, promoting, publishing, reading, and hiring trans scholars should be the goal because as the loathly lady tells us, if you want to use trans bodies and stories then you should commit to us and pay us. Commit to us with scholarships, citations, jobs, and tenure. In the meanwhile, consult, listen, and read trans studies. 

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Liberating the Past

The second lesson from the loathly lady is her response to the impulse of the cisgender order to grasp, seize, capture, and limit her: she demands liberation. For those who have not read the Wife of Bath’s Tale for it’s trans-ness recently, perhaps because we are distracted by the Wife’s own female masculinity, the story ends after the knight being given the choice between an insubordinate distant beautiful partner or a committed but begrudely accepted partner, when he says, the choice is yours. In the end, the best future I see for medieval transgender studies is one based around liberation. This would mean not insisting on trans studies as only that proud but unmedieval modern thing on the one hand and on the other hand not relegating medieval trans figures to a few odd loathly isolated figures and scholars. In short, let medieval transgender studies become what it needs to become. And what that will look like is not something this elf maid / loathly lady can tell you at this particular court of feminists.

What I can tell you is how the Wife of Bath’s story ends. Because after the knight gives his partner the freedom to be whatever she may be, she immediately becomes a beautiful bride. Because what is beautiful is the freedom to be who we need to be be and become what we need to become which means the freedom to not only uncover and express truth but also the liberty to change our minds and even our pronouns. The Tale says she became the elfin maiden again and the story ends there, cut to black and roll credits. Yet I am not convinced that she will always stay that way. With her full liberty, she is free to use her powers as she pleases and needs. This means sometimes she may need to wear the face of the loathly lady killjoy. This may mean sometimes being the fairy dancing in the wood. Sometimes it means standing with a court of feminists as we interrogate an oppressive, misogynistic and sexually abusive field. The Tale ends there but the future is uncertain and that is the point. Because liberation demands uncertainty.

The medieval trans studies that I practice and teach my students is one of many faces, mostly ones that do not look like me. And this is important, because most of my readers and students also don’t look like me, even the trans ones. Because there is no one way to be trans today and certainly no one way to be trans in the past. There is some value in identifying trans persons in the past as helping us see ourselves in the past but if the middle ages is a mirror it is a broken mirror that reflects and refracts, distorts and multiplies. Let’s not just consider those we once called “male to female or female to male” but also those mothers to virgins, reproductive men who become eunuchs, knights who become monks, intersexual hermaphrodites and trans masculine Amazons. Trans does not just allow for movement across the binary or the creation of a space in between but a breaking open of the binary so we see that even within the category of man and woman there are many identities and transitions between. Medieval trans studies is not just about transgender people who look like me. Medieval trans studies is about all of us. 

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A Step Along the Way

The last lesson, I draw from this is not to turn away from the trans-ness in the archive not to turn away from the dysphoria in the archive. Transgender faced a cis accosting in the medieval moment just as trans histories face limiting and erasure in medieval studies. Dysphoria generated by the cis past and present is the elided reality to be detected, revealed, and disclosed. We need dysphoria not just as a way to detect trans people in archives but as a way to see the history of transphobia in cis history and cis historians. Because the loathly lady does not just tell us about herself but about her time, about the generations of historians after her, and about us. She teaches us to detect the systems that oppressed her and oppress us. The goal of liberating medieval transgender studies is that this means liberating all of us. Consent benefits us all. Equity benefits us all. Intersectional justice benefits us all. Commitment to each other in the field and not to a certain way that field has looked in the past is what will see that we have a future at all.

This liberation means working towards a future and medieval studies that is not our own. To quote a prayer made famous by Oscar Romero, “No statement says all that could be said…No confession brings perfection…No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way… We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.” I yearn for a day, perhaps soon, perhaps not so soon, that my remarks today and my scholarship are no longer necessary and indeed quite dated. My hopes are that some of those listening today and speaking today will be those who take us over that next step, that write that next article, organize that next session, teach the next generation of medieval trans scholars. We want to give these students and scholars more liberation than we had. A more ethical profession than we had. A middle ages that is fully medieval and therefore more fully trans. We want them to walk on the foundations that we are excavating and the foundations that we may become. And like all moments in the past and soon to be past, these moments are moments of uncertainty and many possible futures. The medieval past did end up here today but did not have to. Every moment is a moment of possibility if only we have the liberty to choose. Likewise, today, this session, “Towards a Medieval Transgender Studies,” is about the future but also about marking a moment. “We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way.”

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Click Here for More about Medieval Transgender Studies

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Trans Pedagogy: How Transgender Can Save the Middle Ages

"I can't be a pessimist,
because I am alive."

James Baldwin

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In my seminars "Beyond Male and Female: A History of Transgender, Intersex, and Non-Binary Identity," and, "Queer Christianity: A History of Gender and Sexuality in the Church," I run the assignment, The Queer Saints Project. So for this talk, I will use the figure of Joan of Arc as a queer saint to first explain our challenges and promises for medieval transgender studies. Joan allows us to consider our perspective from a distance, because transgender in the military is obviously not a modern conflict. Joan of Arc allows us to consider the current conflict we are in and how we get thru. Because each day all I need to do is check the Chronicle of Higher Education or the national news to discover a new unimagined way in which we are are being eliminated or even killed. That brings me to acknowledge that my title also begs the question, what exactly does she think the Middle Ages, or the studies of, need to be saved from? I think we each could list several things. This talk leverages trans interdisciplinarity against niche expertise, trans collaboration against isolating competition, and trans creativity over pessimism. This final point not only concludes but summarizes my main concern and my main response. Because the biggest threat I see to not only trans studies, the middle ages, but the academy in general is not any one threat from the outside against us but the threat of pessimism and despair from within us. Pessimism is not only the biggest danger for a new generation of jobs the threat that should be our biggest job to address if we are to help the new generation create a better future for our past. 

So why say that Transgender Can Save the Middle Ages? Because Transgender Studies is necessarily interdisciplinary, collaborative, and creative. These are traits that are increasingly critical to the survival of the humanities, especially Medieval Studies, in the face of a changing profession that is eliminating or absorbing fields, increasing the entry cost and exclusivity of stable sustainable jobs, and going through rapid transformations that make the future difficult to read for newly emerging talents as well as those experienced in the industry.

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Interdisciplinarity

Joan is a saintly model, calling for imitation of an interdisciplinary impulse, combining familiar with the disciplines of maidenhood and manhood, scripture and combat. While Medieval Studies has long been interdisciplinary in its integrating of linguistics, history, archeology, religion, economics, and art, Trans Studies offers a network of fields and professions that would radically grow any academic partnership. Beyond affinity groups such as gender and queer studies, trans studies requires literacy in medicine, psychology, law, even military code. Thus, the implicit message of critics of medieval trans studies often seems to be: but I already did my comp. exams, I don’t want to have to learn all this new gender stuff. Yet the radical interdisciplinary nature that makes it intimidating to settled experts is what is making it a training ground for students to enter into the humanities, such as medieval trans studies, with experience working with STEM and polical-science. Teaching medieval trans and intersex history at an institution that identifies as a STEM, not a Liberal Arts, university, I’m grateful to have engineering, nursing, and comp-science students affirm the importance of such classes in their curriculum. 

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Collaboration

Joan of Arc did not save Orleans alone but did so by collaborating with a network of forces, military brain and brawn, stone, metal, and wood, animals, and God. Learning from STEM and Political Science colleagues, as well as other groups in critical race and disability studies, Trans Studies values collaboration. Isolation feels pragmatic in a highly competitive market where one person getting a job will mean many others not getting hired. Yet despite this impulse, we see trans studies and other marginal studies encouraging a radically collaborative sharing of resources, credit, and attention. Why is this? For one, this stems from a lack of resources and respectability to start. In many cases those sharing these resources are those who themselves have very little of their own or just lately gained some reserve of academic juice. It may be the best investment in the future to spend our five-minutes in the room where things happen to slip as many other people into the room as possible. Our 5 minutes of time may become only 3 minutes but the two people we brought in will have 3-5 minutes of their own to do the same. And these people we sneak in may not always look like us. Collaboration is another element of intersectional interdisciplinary work. This is how we do more with less, a skill that administrations are demanding of departments but also a skill that emerging trans studies students and scholars learn from Day 1. In the end, we find ourselves not only working with people who the academy never would have expected but working on projects that we might never have given a second thought if a friend hadn’t said, hey, let’s put my thing together with yours and join forces. This is how we transform fields, putting intersectionality at the center of what we do, not merely as an isolated one-person diversity sub-field. And it makes us better scholars! Learning to better discuss race, disability, gender from our collaborators teaches us to notice things that afterwards we question how we ever did our work without seeing.

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Creativity

What is often forgotten about martyrs is that they may die for the faith, they generally would rather live and indeed fight like hell (as long as they can) for the living. Joan embodies such creativity for us, not only by navigating loop-holes and limitations but by being both war-like and creatively life-seeking. Likewise, creativity is an underrated aspect of Trans Studies. This is often because the academy, like most institutions, is best at replicating itself and the things it knows. As a result, Trans Studies is cast as a new form of Queer Studies or Feminism or as yet another invention of post-modern critical theory. People thus tune out either because they long ago wrote off such –isms or because they feel like they already learned the essentials of that critical turn. But trans people and trans studies does more than merely disturb cisgender people’s sense of gender, does more than merely say, “me too,” in long conversations of oppressions. Trans people and studies exists in a world not built for us. We use the things given to us in new ways that better suit our needs. Or else we invent new tools, terminology, and methods to do things that cis culture cannot. Thus, when the academy declares that the old models are no longer working, trans persons and studies says, yeah, well they never really worked for us. I teach my students to see creativity in trans studies is one that tries to create, to breathe new life, to adapt to survive. Trans Studies acknowledges that not only are academics are losing jobs but lives, with trans youths currently at a 41-50% suicide rate and the average life expectancy of a trans woman of color being 35 years. We are creative in our classrooms not just to keep our professions alive but each other. In the words of James Baldwin, “I cannot be a pessimist, because I am alive.” A creative force profession is just what we need in a pessimistic academy. Something I say before each writing assignment: assume your audience is in some sort of pain, because most likely they are. This shifts us from writing what we need to write to writing what our audience needs to read. 

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The Queer Saints Project

To close, I’ll ground interdisciplinary, collaborative, and creative trans pedagogy with an example from my seminars, The Queer Saints Project. Over a whole month of classes, such an assignment meets traditional academic outcomes, as well as outcomes that the academy has yet to require. In our first week, students delved into the medieval theology of saints, considering concepts such as the Imago Dei, Imitatio Christi, intercessions, iconography, martyrdom and patronage. Then the class examined history, art, and literature for stories of trans and queer saints, from Saint Marinos the Monk to the gender queerness of Saint Joan of Arc. Next, students were challenged to look around them at modern queer persons – who were or would never be canonized by the Church - who have lived out the same virtues of being an icon, a role model, someone worthy of imitation, who embodied ideals, whose intercession or patronage helped those in need. They compared their stories narratively, iconographically, and socially to the historical saints. At this stage, they wrote papers making their cases for their own Queer Saints.

Finally, on the last week of classes they reflected back on themselves, asking, “what makes me queer?” and “what makes me set-apart or sainted?” Making their own icons and mottos, mini saint’s lives, students shared struggles, hopes, and insights with one another. I had a queer woman of color share that our discussion of hair as a sign of shamed and reclaimed pride helped pull her out of a mid-semester depression when a flurry of white-supremacist hate against her hair made her question her own beauty and value. Her hair made her a saint. Her mottos were, #It'sMyHairAndIWantItForever and #TheBeautyOfAFro. Another student reported that she felt coming into the class that medieval history and religion were the property of white cis-het men and now she feels like she can claim these things and in which she can sees herself. Her motto was, #Thebiblesayswhat? A non-binary student wrote saying that they hardly ever get to see gender queer adults not only living but thriving and that this has transformed their sense of what is possible for their careers. Earlier in the semester, someone told me how sad they seemed and how they wished to scoop this student up and protect them. By the end of the semester, this student was saying how they wanted to scoop up those queer younger than them and keep them safe. Their motto was, #MournTheDeadFightForTheLiving. They affirmed that often we can save ourselves by saving one another. And that, after all, is really the thesis of my talk. When all is said and done, that is why I work in this field. This may bring a new generation of students to transgender or medieval studies but because trans and medieval studies can help empower new generations to create a new future from our past. Yes, Transgender Can Saves the Middle Ages, by which I mean, through intersectional collaboration and creativity embodied problematically by figures such as Joan of Arc, I believe we might just save one another. And yes, yes, we might find ourselves burned at the legal, federal, religious and professional stake. But I cannot tell you or my students what troubles the future may hold, I can help you learn how to face them.

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Click Here for More about Trans Pedagogy

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Call for Papers: Transliterature Sponsored Conference Panels 2017

Remembering all those fighting the fight 
On the Feast Day of Saint Joan of Arc

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In the open letter to the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, I mentioned that there had been a downturn in transgender and intersex focused conference panels. In 2016, two sessions each were devoted to the respective gender minorities. In 2017, no sessions existed for either to attract, collect, and promote these fields. While at the Congress, I sat in on some fantastic papers that addressed trans or non-binary embodiments in some way. Also, I had some cherished coffee breaks and meals with amazing queer, trans, and non-binary scholars; some of whom were able to be at the conference because of the Transgender Travel Fund provided by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Listening to their work and their stories, I was honored and affirmed to share in the significant contributions and sacrifices being made to improve the field and the lives of those who work in it. But I also felt the weight of how hard it is, possibly too hard and unsustainable, for those who carry the burden to push our community forward.

Amidst the tears and mutual support, there were direct actions that continue to give me hope. This includes the invitation to organize panels for the upcoming BABEL Working Group and Medieval Congress 2018. Two panels are already approved and open for submissions for the Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group in Reno, NV. The first invites submissions for scholars, authors, and artists working to promote the consideration or reimagining of transgender history. The second calls for submissions to take the risk to discuss the fraught but often life-giving intersection of faith communities and scholarship. Abstracts are due June 10. Finally, at the business meeting for the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship a vote was called for over a dozen panels, of which only about a half dozen were selected for submitted for consideration to the Medieval Congress. I am excited and encouraged to say that when a sessions "Towards a Medieval Transgender Studies" went up for a vote, so many hands in the 100+ person room was raised that the panel was approved without a count, on grounds of being "vaguely unanimous." The session is yet to be approved by the Congress but please feel called to consider and contact me via e-mail if you have interest in participating or if you want more information.

Looking back and looking ahead, I also wanted to say a word of gratitude and wonder for all the committed, impassioned, and brilliant academics, artists, and writers I've get to know over the course of doing this work. What keeps me going and motivated to push for more sessions and engagement in the fields of trans, intersex, feminist, disability, and critical race studies is enjoyment and learning I get from encountering your professional and personal contributions. I consider my #1 job is to be a cheerleader for these amazing communities. Because you all are working yourself raw and taking big chances, doing your share and more to make the academy and our culture better. That deserves to be remembered, honored, and I am just tickled ROYGBIV to be able to work with you. Thank you and may you persist no matter how many times you are warned or have things explained to you.

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Towards a Medieval Transgender Studies

(email: M.W. Bychowski, MBychows@gwu.edu)

Due September 15

The International Congress on Medieval Studies

Kalamazoo, MI. May, 2018.

Facing resistance in regards to its place in contemporary society, transgender studies is beginning to look for roots within premodern eras. In recent years, a question has been floating around medieval and transgender studies, spurring conference papers and special issues of the Medieval Feminist Forum and Transgender Studies Quarterly: how might we begin to articulate a medieval transgender studies? Gaining momentum, a critical turn towards a medieval transgender studies shows signs of emergence. If such a movement is to be possible, much work remains to be done. Following in the tradition of interventions by queer, disability, and feminist scholarship, debates are arising regarding language, identity, narrative, historicism, and methodologies. This session will serve as a forum where presenters will articulate the challenges, the promises, and the resources that lay on the road towards a trans future for the past. Participants are encouraged to consider the archives of medieval history, theology, art, medicine, science, and literature that can be put into critical dialog with trans voices from the past and today.

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Imagining Trans History and Transhistoricism: 

Creation and/as/or Critique

(Email: M.W. Bychowski, mbychows@email.gwu.edu, 

and Bruce Holsinger, bwholsinger@gmail.com)
DUE JUNE 10th (NOW CLOSED).

5th Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group

Reno, NV. October 2017.

Sandy Stone’s foundational transgender studies essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” sets out a necessary and broad mission for the future of the past: “transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their history, to begin to rearticulate their lives not as a series of erasures… but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed body… to begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written.” In the spirit of this mission statement, our panel invites a wide examination of the histories and discourses from and through which concepts of transgender develop.

The panel will be open to a range of approaches. History invites creativity. Medieval and modern texts invite both critical readers and artists to imagine the life and lives that occur in the silences, though often in very different ways. Living in a world and language not designed for it, transgender history regularly appears among the contradictions, erasures, and euphemistic metaphors in the official records. As a result, telling and otherwise recreating trans history demands careful scrutiny of the modes and limitations of anti-transphobic creative work. Introducing and connecting ideas from across time, trans historical work time and again forms intersections with transhistorical palimpsests. This panel considers the myriad ways that scholars, authors, poets, lyricists, and artists fill out the interweaving cultural pasts and presents of transgender. The aim is to ask questions, take risks, and play with the arts and sciences that connect generations of trans histories and trans dreams.

We hope to receive proposals that reflect both scholarly and creative work, and ideally a combination of the two. The session will feature a series of ten to fifteen minute presentations, followed by a discussion.

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Here I Am, Stuck in the Middle with You

(Email: Ben Utter, bdutter@gmail.com)
DUE JUNE 10th (NOW CLOSED).

5th Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group

Reno, NV. October 2017.

Finding, keeping, proclaiming, losing, or breaking with one’s faith is always a risky business, and in America, where faith is a big business, the bad faith of Evangelical Christian voters has made relationships riskier than ever for those who find themselves caught between mutually-antagonistic cultural communities. This roundtable session will be an opportunity for BABELers of faith or with ties to various faith traditions—Christian and otherwise—to address the relationship between faith (i.e. the non-empirical, the spiritual) and action or risk. As people between these communities, we may have acted as interpreters, if not necessarily apologists, between groups that regard one another with deep suspicion or even hostility. What are the possibilities and perils of such a position, now that we can no longer be (and probably shouldn’t have ever been) neutral points of contact? How do we use our positions at the intersection of communities that don’t often talk or get along? What are the struggles and how might these contact points be used or improved in the future? Can we condemn our “post-factual” world while at the same time avoiding denigrating people of faith? By the same token, how might we encourage our faith communities to be skeptical of neo-liberal “data idolatry” and to consider the important relationship between facts (and by proxy, research) and interpretation (and/or belief)?

We invite participation from people of, adjacent to, in recovery from, or without faith or spiritual conviction of any kind. The session will feature a series of ten-minute presentations, followed by a discussion. Please send proposals of 250 words or so describing the story, homily, confessio, prayer, waz, or apostatic manifesto you’d like to share.

Co-organizers: Ben Utter, Gabrielle MW Bychowski, Lesley Curtis, Alex Mueller, Noelle Phillips, & Cord Whittaker.

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Transgender Can Save the Middle Ages: A Letter to the International Congress on Medieval Studies

“You ask me what I want this year
And I try to make this kind and clear
Just a chance that maybe we'll find better days”

The Goo Goo Dolls

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Dear friends in the Medieval Congress,

I don't know most of you personally, although I would like to begin. Most of you don't know me, although that is less important. What is more important is that we all could stand to know more about all the great people in the trans community. Let me tell you a bit about them:

A magical moment happened in my house about a week ago. It was bedtime and I was reading to our 10-year-old and our 7-year-old. I usually begin with a bit of educational literature before moving on to the fiction. Well, this night I had just put down "This Book is Gay," a primer on the spectrum of gender and sexual diversity, when our youngest raised their hand. I was expecting a question (they ask great questions) but to my surprise they had an admission. They wanted to confess that years ago, when they first remember learning about LGBT identities from me, they had assumed (not yet realizing that having two moms wasn't a norm) that it was a distinctly medieval thing. Can you imagine? I am guessing that like me you learned about LGBT culture AFTER or separately from learning about the Middle Ages. But for this child, the gender queer kid of a trans lesbian family, the Middle Ages started as a queer place before it was anything else. I'm not asking for laughs, I'm just telling you about family.

That was a good night but there are harder nights. I try to read or adapt medieval stories to read to my kids. Some nights are easier. Our kids LOVE the Tale of Chanticleer. Talking animals? Big fans. Kissing butts and farts out the window? They eat that up! But then I turn to the next Tale and I see the rape of young women. I turn it again and I see women being treated as property. I turn it again and I see a father cut off his girl's head as she begs for him to reconsider. Those are harder nights. Then I still go in there to read to them. I'm not asking for pity, I'm telling you about an institution of sexism.

Then there are the days that I get approached by people on the street, at conferences, or via e-mail. I hear from established medievalists about how they are transgender but haven't been able to come out because they fear the ridicule of fellow medievalists. At conferences and online we hear the jokes. You may not know we are listening. You may not know we are trans. But we hear you. Then I find some way to respond to them. I'm not asking for explanations, I'm telling you about your colleagues.

Then there are times I hear this, "How are YOU a medievalist?" I've gotten this from prominent scholars in Trans Studies (if you are familiar with the field, you know their names) as they looked me up and down, then proceeded into a diatribe about the marginalization of female scholars, Catholicism, and male supremacy. There are many who share their view and there are real instances, even traditions, that contribute to this concern. Many in transgender studies find it hard to move into medieval studies because of some valid fears. Even if this is hardly representative of the whole of transgender or medieval studies, they voice issues that deserve to be answered. Then I (and others) find some way to defend the field. I'm not asking for thanks, I'm telling you how our profession is perceived.

Then there are times when I'm grabbing coffee with early career scholars, young women, who just aren't sure how or if there could be a place for them in the profession. The job market is brutal for those of us who are lucky enough to find work. And most are not that lucky. And we hear about male supremacist websites, about institutions intentionally favoring male candidates. And we hear men joking about how "feminism" or "transgender" is taking over everything, how funny it all is, how no one can take a joke. Then we find some way to support each other to keep sending applications. I'm not asking for you to surrender your sense of humor (although I would recommend the better brands), I'm tell you about how many women are getting Ph.Ds in medieval studies and how few of them are getting hired.

Then there is me packing my bags for Kalamazoo, like I do every year, like I plan to for many years to come. And one of the things I am packing, which is there every year, is anxiety and frustration. I recall the mocking of women, feminism, transgender persons, and the small gestures being made to give us back a bit of our dignity. I recall how last year there were two panels on transgender and intersex in the Middle Ages, how this year there are none. I get ready to go through the TSA and their policy of groping each trans person's genitals EVERY TIME because we don't match the 3D models programmed inside their body scanners. I recall how hard it is for me to get to the conference each year and imagine how hard it is for others. I will find out, as I do every year, who decided it wasn't worth the fight and stayed home. Then I'll find some way to encourage them to consider trying again next year. I'm not asking for the Medieval Congress to radically change, I'm telling you about what stands in the way of it growing.

This letter is not an attack. I'm just telling you about my community. I'm telling you about a side of your community that may not be the parts you get to see. I'm not asking for you to make everything better all at once. I'm asking that you try to make it a little better today than it was yesterday. Even if you stumble today, it will soon be yesterday and then you can try again. This letter is my way of saying that I'll be there along side you in the Medieval Congress because like you I love what we try to do here. I love it so much that I want us to do it better. I want it to be better for those who don't come or can't come. I want it to be better for those who might come or will come in the future. I want it to be better for those who are being ridiculed. I want it to be better for those who don't get it yet because you deserve to know how much better things can be. I want it to be better because I know so many amazing women and trans people who will revolutionize and revitalize any profession in which they are able to be a part. I want it to be better because I know that the Middle Ages are worth studying for everyone. I want it to be better because I know that women can save the Middle Ages. I want it to be better because I know that transgender can save the Middle Ages.

So don't do it for me. Do it for them. If you can't do it for them, do it for yourself because you deserve to be a part of a Medieval Studies that does a better job at making the world better.

Sincerely,

A friend

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