WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

Abstract:

This article places Marcella Althaus-Reid’s theological reflection on popular devotion to the figure of Santa Librada in Argentina in conversation with scholarship on androgyny, nonbinary identity, and medieval gender-crossing saints. Tying together strands of medieval writing on wondrous bodies and contemporary articulations of nonbinary identity foregrounds how nonbinary embodiments destabilize modern conceptions of binary gender. Although I am not suggesting a return to premodern conceptions of the body, medieval texts are instructive insofar as they offer an epistemology of embodiment that evades the consolidation of binary categories of sex and gender.