xenia’s Reviews > The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance > Status Update

It's scary how much the 'nature = progeny' of medieval Christianity still informs modern science. Like, yes, evolutionary adaptations are passed through genetic transmissions, but living beings are experiencing things, not cryptoutilitarians with memetic dreams of heraldry. Emptying out the religious aspect of inheritance, doesn't rid us of the logic that inheritance is all that matters. Queer animals abound.

Some really interesting stuff in ch5 on the rise of medieval surgions as a profession, whose 'correction' of bodies back to their 'natural' form coincides with Christian ideals of procreation. In other words, Christians have, in part, to blame for dick jokes/body shaming, because if you couldn't penetrate you couldn't create progeny. Intellectuals had "heated debates" on whether impotence annulled marriages. Wild.

This is stunning research. It's approachable, but in depth. Each chapter is self-contained, yet connected. We learn about divine androgynes, monstrous hermaphrodites, and the racial tensions they signified. It's a work of history, textual analysis, social anthropology. And from Aristotle, you can already see the inception of whiteness, where perfection equals sexual segregation, emerge, in all its totalitarian force.

Theologians used to believe that Adam, containing the potential of Eve within himself, was either agender or ALL genders (a divine androgyne). So if anyone says we have to return to traditional genders, tell them they're a fucking fake fan and that we need to go even FURTHER back lol.