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A prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds. In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery. In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative account of theology’s value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.
The word spirituality is notoriously difficult to define. It is often used in a vague way to refer to the inner relationship between the self and God. The implication is that people only relate to God with their “inner” being (soul/spirit) and not with any other part of who they are. There is a lurking influence of Neoplatonism within Christian thinking that tends to assume that the material is bad and the spiritual good, that there is a gaping hole between our inner and our outer selves and that the proper location of devotion is our inner being. There is a further assumption that, especially in the writings of Paul, the soul is to be placed in the “good” category while opposite it, in the “bad” category, is the body—leaving the question of what is meant by heart and mind largely ignored. Paula Gooder here explores the meaning of six key concepts in the Bible, especially in the writings of Paul, before moving on to explore what Paul intended by the contrasts he drew, and what implications this all has for the way we think and speak about our spirituality today.