Transgender Materialism : Gender and Sexuality in the Life and Passion of Susanna
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | JOURNAL OF LATE ANTIQUITY |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | https://muse.jhu.edu/article/946854 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jla.2024.a946854 |
| Keywords | transgender saints; historical materialism; hagiography; feminism |
| Attached files | |
| Description | An ambiguity lays at the heart of late antique religious literature, and in particular trans saints’ lives: the celebration of what is ordinarily prohibited in both canon law and imperial legislation. These popular late-antique narratives include the anonymous Life and Passion of Susanna, which depicts a literary character of a trans monk, virgin, and martyr in the mid-fourth-century Palestinian setting. Such texts and images mediate social identities, albeit their treatment is constrained due to the ramifications of the literary genre and iconographic traditions. Examining this rarely discussed vita, which has not yet been translated in full into any modern language, and the concomitant hagiographic iconography, this article investigates late antique social and religious identities at the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. It begins with critical historiography of scholarly accounts of the late antique “trans saint” that drew on methodological paradigms of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and poststructuralism, often interpreting these saintly figures as transhistorical and literary constructions. The article argues for an intersectional-materialist transfeminist analysis of these texts as a heuristic approach to the historical record attentive to material life after the end of the linguistic turn in the humanities. |
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