SESSION: Trans (In)visibility in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Cultures

Analyses of modern and contemporary art that foreground trans approaches have burgeoned in recent years, but to date, scholars working on earlier periods have been much less visible in the discussion. As such, this session invites proposals on pre-modern visual and material cultures that complicated, effaced or transgressed binary constructions of sex and gender, and/or from scholars applying trans methodologies to medieval and early modern images and objects.

Gender fluidity and mutability can be located both in the trajectories of medieval and early modern lives, and in a wide range of discourses and practices. Artists adopted creative approaches to gender variance in their work; material cultures of bodily ministration and display were at the heart of gender performance; images and objects challenged strictly binary models of embodiment. We welcome proposals from scholars working on pre-modern trans art histories (broadly conceived) from around the globe. We also welcome papers that explore the distinctions and intersections between transgender, nonbinary and queer methodologies.

This session asserts that drawing attention to gender nonconformity in the past is politically urgent, and that art historians working on medieval and early modern materials have a vital contribution to make to this conversation.

Session Convenor:

Maya Corry, Oxford Brookes University

Robert Mills, University College London

Session Speakers:

Emily Metcalf-Corrison, University of Aberdeen

Are the Archangels Trans?

Throughout the Middle Ages, the archangels, invisible beings, were represented as having human bodies. While angels were recognised as being without gender or sex, they are nevertheless represented in gendered bodies. These gendered bodies adapt, depending on the role of the archangel and the viewer, both internal and external. The notion of medieval gender is one which has been challenged by recent studies in trans* histories, leading to the conclusion that gender was more nuanced than is often ascribed.

This paper will argue that the archangels are inherently queer, for they reflect elements of their environment and the viewer. As expressions of human spiritual aspiration, the archangels are uniquely queer in their embodiment. While the archangels’ iconography is linked to their Biblically ascribed roles, their representations are not solely dictated by this. The shape and form of the archangels are reflective of the tensions that humans experience in their spiritual lives. Theologians have contemplated and written on the nature of the angelic body; the nuanced existence of these beings is also expressed through the visual medium.

Since gender is a uniquely human experience, in its construction and understanding in relation to societal roles, the genderless angel reflects the viewer’s gendered experiences. It is in this way that the archangels participate in trans experiences of gender, with them adapting to their space and viewer. Thus, I will argue that the archangels present a mechanism of gender queerness through space and vision.

Camille Campos Fragoso, CRH-EHESS (Paris)

Clovis Maillet, CRH-EHESS (Paris)

(Un)Seeing Trans Women on Trial: The Construction of Sex Categories in Sexual Misconduct Accusations (14th–15th Centuries)

In a manuscript of Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, the public humiliation of Madame Marguerite—the trans woman of nouvelle 45 (Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 252, fol. 108r)—is depicted as reaffirming her feminine gender performance even as she is accused of acting as a man, engaging in sexual misconduct with married women and virgins in Rome. This scene echoes the procedural stages where the law sought to reaffirm publicly the very sex it had constructed. In this narrative, as in the courts that may have inspired it, the act of judging becomes an act of sexuation/gendering.

By contrast, across the long history of juridical formulations of the body, sex appears less as a natural datum than as a legal fiction, an effect of the operations through which law renders acts intelligible. After centuries of legal operations through which the penal language of sex was formed and essentialized, contemporary sodomy trials involving trans women reproduce this very logic. In establishing someone’s sex, trials enact the same mechanism that transforms indeterminate acts into fixed categories, making the crime of sodomy possible by fabricating the very sex it claims to judge.

This paper seeks to complicate the issue of visibility and invisibility in images and texts of trials for sexual misconduct and sodomy involving trans women. It demonstrates both the long history of transmisogynistic imagery and the ways these documents reveal the agency of some trans women within the fictitious construction of gender categories.

Giulia Zimei, Sapienza University Rome

Queering the Magi: Gender Fluidity and the Mutable Identity of the Wise Men in the Early Modern World

By examining a body of Adoration of the Magi paintings in which one of the Magi is a woman, or at least evokes gender ambiguities, this paper explores how the early modern figure of the African Magus reflects a negotiation of gender rooted in its iconographic overlap with the Queen of Sheba.

Within early modern theological and political debates, it was crucial to ascribe a kingship to the pope to legitimise his temporal power. I will argue that one possible visual strategy for articulating this concept was the syncretism between the Queen of Sheba and one of the Magi. Such a conflation reveals a form of gender mutability supported by a corresponding theological fluidity already inscribed in the exegetical tradition surrounding the Magi.

Matthew’s Gospel, the first text to recount the episode, assigns no gender to the Magi and defines neither their names, number, nor royal status. It was later textual traditions which progressively shaped their identities. Recognising this process allows for a rereading of the Magi’s gender as itself the outcome of a long negotiation between exegetical interpretation and artistic traditions.

Adopting a long durée approach, the paper engages with a close reading of Flemish and Italian Adorations of the Magi paintings: the Antwerp School panel at Palazzo Abatellis, works by Pieter van Cocke Aelst, and paintings by Lorenzo Monaco and Aurelio Lomi. These case studies demonstrate that, in the early modern period, gender identity was articulated in more fluid and performative ways than traditionally assumed in art-historical scholarship.

Olivia Garro, Coventry University

With God’s permission…changed sex, not by witchcraft but naturally”: A Case Study on Gender in the Italian Visual Culture of Witchcraft

Gender transgression and its visual culture in the early modern period have been much debated in the last few years, particularly in regard to the persecution of witchcraft. Many alleged witches were accused of a number of sexual transgressions, from upending gender roles to changing their own and their victims’ sex and even stealing people’s genitals, both momentarily and permanently. These accusations have had infamously tragic outcomes and have strongly impacted the contemporary representations of witchcraft, notoriously hyper-sexualised, gender-based, and stereotyped. However, most anthropological and art-historical studies have focused on Central and Northern European witch-hunts and art, and we are still missing an in-depth analysis of their Southern European and Italian counterparts.

This paper will offer a case study of the theological positions and visual representations regarding gender roles and ‘change of sex’ in Friar Francesco Maria Guazzo’s demonological treatise, the 1608 Compendium Maleficarum. While it is generally believed that most Catholic publications—and particularly the ones related to the Inquisition—either condemned ‘change of sex’ as a demonic act or nothing more than an illusion, Guazzo’s work paints a completely different picture, explaining how and why it was not only possible but even allowed by God. The Compendium’s official approval of the ecclesiastical authorities and wide distribution, together with its numerous references and citations, help us reassess the cultural understanding of gender transition and the visual representation of gender in the Italian witchcraft persecutions.

Response:

Kit Heyam, Independent scholar