One of the things I do in my ARCH30760: Early Medieval Ireland course. “We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman [or a man] at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time. ”https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times …
I think one of the most important things to teach students is that our concepts of a gender binary are in fact very much so informed by modern ideas, and the idea that they were always rigid and universally defined is not true.
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One of the things I struggle with slightly, is that early medieval social identities were certainly relational, but also, to be honest, more essentialist. My get out sentence is “we study these societies, we don’t have to like them” What’s with the church thinking slavery is ok?
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This is also true. I do think though there was likely room for different ideas. Trans people have always existed, although the extent to which they may have lived their lives as they wanted to is probably going to differ on a local level.
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