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 …
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What I like Is this gives me scope to say “Yes, early medieval texts were misogynist and early Irish Laws (largely) subjugated women, but @PeritiaEditors writings on third gender, and archaeologies of practice and women’s actual lives give us lots of things to talk about here”
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Replying to @AidanOSulliva15
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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Replying to @AdmiralHip
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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Replying to @AidanOSulliva15
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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Replying to @AdmiralHip @AidanOSulliva15
I think it's easy for students to fall into the trap of viewing past societies as monoliths based on the narrow sources, which I think scholars can do also sometimes. But yes, we do not have to like these societies at all.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip
We can poke at the texts too, they’re robust enough
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