Glorious Bodies

"In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon shows that gender transition significantly predates its take-over by modern medical technology. In the English Renaissance, he argues, the conceptual vocabulary for imagining gender variance was not medicine but theology. In chapters on Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. Rejecting the broadly shared assumption that trans life is a specifically modern and exclusively secular phenomenon, Glorious Bodies insists that the religious prehistories of transition have an ongoing significance for understanding and combating contemporary transphobia. By recovering theology's affirmative trans capacities, Gordon offers a counter-narrative to both the secular state, which currently seeks to criminalize transness out of existence, as well as the right-wing Christian consensus, according to which transition is a kind of heresy"--