Byzantine Intersectionality

A fascinating history of marginalized identities in the medieval world

While the term "intersectionality" was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Roland Betancourt explores these issues in the context of the Byzantine Empire, using sources from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. Highlighting nuanced and strikingly modern approaches by medieval writers, philosophers, theologians, and doctors, Betancourt offers a new history of gender, sexuality, and race.

Betancourt weaves together art, literature, and an impressive array of texts to investigate depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin Mary, tactics of sexual shaming in the story of Empress Theodora, narratives of transgender monks, portrayals of same-gender desire in images of the Doubting Thomas, and stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in representations of the Ethiopian Eunuch. He also gathers evidence from medical manuals detailing everything from surgical practices for late terminations of pregnancy to save a mother's life to a host of procedures used to affirm a person's gender.

Showing how understandings of gender, sexuality, and race have long been enmeshed, Byzantine Intersectionality offers a groundbreaking look at the culture of the medieval world.

"Intersectionality, a term coined in 1989, is rapidly increasing in importance within the academy, as well as in broader civic conversations. It describes the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexual orientation alongside related systems of oppression, domination, and discrimination. Together, these frameworks are used to understand how systematic injustice or social inequality occurs. In this book, Roland Betancourt examines the presence of marginalized identities and intersectionality in the medieval era. He reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying, non-monogamous marriages, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and non-binary gender identifications, representations of disability, and the oppression of minorities. In contrast to contemporary expectations of the medieval world, this book looks at these problems from the Byzantine Empire and its neighbors in the eastern mediterranean through sources ranging from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. In each of five chapters, Betancourt provides short, carefully scaled narratives used to illuminate nuanced and surprising takes on now-familiar subjects by medieval thinkers and artists. For example, Betancourt examines depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin; the origins of sexual shaming and bullying in the story of Empress Theodora; early beginnings of trans history as told in the lives of saints who lived portions of their lives within different genders; and the ways in which medieval authors understood and depicted disabilities. Deeply researched, this is a groundbreaking new look at medieval culture for a new generation of scholars"--
This book is for the outcast and for those who inhabit the margins of the past and present. . . . Byzantine Intersectionality [also] provides art historians, archaeologists, and historians with a better theoretical basis for reconstructing the complex lived reality of queerness, sexual violence, consent, and racial profiling. The marginalized biblical figures and saints examined together serve as a new testament to how engrained systematic oppression functions in society.---Sarah Bond, Hyperallergic
Byzantine Intersectionality . . . quotes Monica Lewinsky in its epigraph and brings an activist's zeal to its queer-theory close readings of texts and images from the Eastern Roman Empire between the fourth and fifteenth centuries. By scouring legal, medical, and religious sources, and reading misogynist invectives against the grain, Betancourt builds a fascinating picture of more fluid attitudes and practices around sexuality than have been suggested in the mainstream historical record . . . the details Betancourt excavates can be as illuminating as they are juicy.---Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine