xenia’s Reviews > The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance > Status Update
xenia
is 80% done
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.
— May 18, 2025 06:26PM
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xenia’s Previous Updates
xenia
is 70% done
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.
— May 18, 2025 01:36AM
xenia
is 50% done
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.
— May 12, 2025 12:47AM
xenia
is 15% done
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.
— Apr 26, 2025 04:18PM
xenia
is 10% done
Huh, so sodomy, in 13th century France, was defined as an inversion of sexual roles between a man and a woman. Switching roles, such as from a woman penetrated to a woman penetrating, was understood as hermaphroditism. Sexual deviancy cohered to behaviour, not morphology, with sodomy used to designate perversions of marriage—sex without the aim of begetting children.
— Apr 25, 2025 10:28PM
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May 18, 2025 06:26PM
I really love the fields of sensory ecology and biosemiotics for filling out the story of evolution, by rejecting cartesian/behaviourist modes of understanding, and returning living beings to the lifeworlds they've always had. Christianity, at least the kind represented here, is all about annulling the lifeworlds of those under scrutiny. It's reductive and catastrophic, to the point of life and to those under its thumb. Like the neo-Darwinians, experience is denied, for a purely mechanistic teleology. It's tragic.
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This form of thinking still has a lot of influence, unfortunately. Kinda unrelated, but I'm reading Erich Fromm right now and you see that his humanism (which is very much rooted on a weird form of Christianity) can only see the human as that which is coherent or in accordance with your ideal of human. Which logically and ethically, leads to the negation to perceive the radical other or, worse, it's annihilation through genocide.
It's one of the reasons I bounced really hard off Marxist humanism, before circling back and embracing it. You see this logic in Fanon too, when he talks about the conflation of blackness with animality, but never considers the animal itself as undeserving of death, primitivity, and utility.It boggles me how many Marxists don't see the connection between their own subjugation and that of animals under capitalism. One time, a friend and I were at a socialist BBQ, and all the men were outside grilling meat, while we were inside with the women eating homemade vegan stuff (that probably took an hour longer to prepare). I know ecofeminists gets a bad rap for being essentialist, but I swear to god femmes, thems, and women engage with intersectional thought in a far more prefigurative way than men do.
Soz, this became a rant about men. Lol.
Twelve year old me says: "animals are cool!" 😖
Not a problem, It's great to know how you feel about it: If there were no things to rant about, then that would really be worrisome, no?I don't know, maybe that's why I'm trying to find an alternative in Buddhism, but then you see all the problems it has; then I try to dive into anarchism, and there is some good stuff there but here in Mexico with the extreme violence and the feminicides most organizations and groups got bogged down into terrorism and sectarianism. It's hard to organize and get people going where you witness red all over and apathy everywhere.
Right now I'm trying to get somewhere with Levinas and meditation, but I don't know, I get the feeling that there is always something missing here, in action, theory, and praxis, and that everytime I indulge in shit that doesn't align with it I feel bad all over, you know? Sorry, that probably made no sense.
Anyhow, I hope we can conquer violence and our judgements, letting at least something be better than, well, "this".
