Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Jules Riegel
Meeting time: Thursday, 9:45-11:45 am
This course takes an expansive, global approach to transgender history. Students will examine the lives of ancient and medieval people who crossed boundaries of sex and gender; consider the historical overlaps between cross-dressing, queer sexuality, and gender non-conformity; and discover the history of trans activism, both in the U.S. and globally. Students will become familiar with some of the global vocabulary of gender identities beyond the binary and will understand the historical impacts of phenomena such as racism, imperialism, and medicalization on gender identities, particularly since the nineteenth century. In the process, we will consider what it means to study trans history: where can we find trans people in the past? How do we know, and what terms should we use when we talk about them? What are our methodological and ethical obligations to historical trans people and communities? Through religious texts, poetry, art, legal cases, travelogues, newspapers, films, documentaries, and oral histories, we will discover the diverse historical lives of gender-variant people around the world. We will seek to deepen our understanding of the historical and cultural contexts in which these people lived, and to uncover the impacts of trans history in our world today.