I'm starting a series of four articles from a collection entitled Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. After this first article, the others group nicely to cover shifts in cultural understandings of gender and sexuality categories in western Europe in the 16th through 18th centuries. If it weren't for the blog's structure of covering the contents of a collection in series, I'd pair this current article with another one I have coming up on the sexual context of cross-dressing in the medieval Middle East. So you'll have to "hold that thought" for another month until I get to it.
I've just spent the weekend in New York City at a conference on dress and fashion in medieval history (which my girlfriend was one of the organizers for) and had the fun of meeting a scholar whose work has appeared in this blog: Francesca Canadé Sautman, one of the editors of the collection Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages. Though, in the way of academia, her paper this weekend had nothing to do with sexuality, but was on 15th century Burgundian women's head coverings.
During the end-of-conference discussion session I was tossed the assignment to answer an audience member's question about medieval cross-dressing and gender identity. I'm not sure that my answer was any more coherent than "it's complicated, talk to me during the lunch break." But it was fun to participate to that extent. (And I've been once again inspired to start working on a paper on the topic of medieval cross-dressing for the Kalamazoo medieval congress at some point in the future.)
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