You have downloaded a document from The Central and Eastern European Online Library The joined archive of hundreds of Central-, East- and South-East-European publishers, research institutes, and various content providers Source: CAS Sofia Working Paper Series CAS Sofia Working Paper Series Location: Bulgaria Author(s): Mariana Bodnaruk Title: Palestinian Trans Saints in Late Antiquity: Gender and Sexuality in the Lives of Pelagia the Penitent, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis from Feminist and Trans Perspectives Palestinian Trans Saints in Late Antiquity: Gender and Sexuality in the Lives of Pelagia the Penitent, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis from Feminist and Trans Perspectives 13/2023 Issue: Citation style: Mariana Bodnaruk. "Palestinian Trans Saints in Late Antiquity: Gender and Sexuality in the Lives of Pelagia the Penitent, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis from Feminist and Trans Perspectives". CAS Sofia Working Paper Series 13:1-21. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1124460 CEEOL copyright 2023 CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY SOFIA CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES Issue 13 ADVANCED ACADEMIA PLATFORM 2021–2022 Sofia 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 The following publication presents part of the author’s research carried out under the Advanced Academia Platform of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia. CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY SOFIA 7B, Stefan Karadja St., Sofia 1000, Bulgaria phone: (+359) 2 980 08 43, (+359) 878 599 222 cas@cas.bg, www.cas.bg CAS Working Paper Series No. 13/2023 with the financial support of the Gerda Henkel Foundation This publication is available also in electronic form at www.ceeol.com. ISSN: 2683–1341 Copyright © 2023 by the CAS contributors/CAS Copyright remains with the individual authors/CAS. This publication may be distributed to other individuals for non-commercial use, provided that the text and this note remain intact. This publication may not be reprinted or redistributed for commercial use without prior written permission from the author and CAS. If you have any questions about permissions, please, write to cas@cas.bg. Preferred Citation: Bodnaruk, Mariana, Palestinian Trans Saints in Late Antiquity: Gender and Sexuality in the Lives of Pelagia the Penitent, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis from Feminist and Trans Perspectives. CAS Working Paper Series No. 13/2023: Sofia 2023.Advanced Academia Platform, a project of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia. CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 MARIANA BODNARUK PALESTINIAN TRANS SAINTS IN LATE ANTIQUITY: GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE LIVES OF PELAGIA THE PENITENT, MARY OF EGYPT, AND SUSANNA OF ELEUTHEROPOLIS FROM FEMINIST AND TRANS PERSPECTIVES Abstract: This paper reexamines feminist and transgender theory’s concepts of agency and resistance by analyzing three late antique Lives of gendercrossing saints from the Holy Land: Pelagia the Harlot, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis. It investigates the possibilities for agency and resistance of the fictional protagonists of these hagiographic narratives against the forms of domination and the encroachments of power in the Byzantine social and religious contexts. This study contends that, despite the constraints of their situation, the subjugated individuals were capable of exercising their agency and were not passive victims of the existing social system. Even if the gender-crossing acts themselves did not undermine the conditions of oppression, albeit discursively destabilizing the societal norms of gender and sexuality, the small-scale forms of resistance of the dominated can be recovered in these accounts, notwithstanding the fragmentary and transient character of these efforts. Keywords: trans saints, Byzantium, hagiography, sanctity, gender INTRODUCTION The fifth-century Life of Pelagia is one of the earliest legends1 of trans monks – the other being Eugenia2 – before trans saints became a major theme of late antique 1 2 Sebastian O. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, trans., “Pelagia of Antioch,” in Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, trans. Brock and Harvey (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 41–62; Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 150–56, has discovered that in the fifth century the author of the Life of Pelagia amalgamated a vague version of a story of an Antiochian virgin and the story, first narrated by John Chrysostom, of an anonymous penitent actress, merging them into the Christian romance of Pelagia and the bishop Nonnos. The “cross-dressing” motif is too diffused to be traced to one figure. The legend of Eugenia, with a second-century setting, predates that of Pelagia. 1 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 hagiography. After the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, “cross-dressing” became a dominant motif in the vitae of a group of female saints. Besides the Greek Thecla, the Roman Perpetua is also considered to be paradigmatically representative of “cross-dressing.” Among the thirteen known Lives from the late antique Eastern Mediterranean, the legend of Pelagia of Antioch, a redeemed harlot clad in male attire who withdrew to a male lavra on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem as a monk under the name Pelagios, is considered to be a prototype of a series of trans monks’ vitae. In turn, in the Life of Mary of Egypt (wrongly attributed to Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem), a fifth/early sixth-century penitent harlot living in the Judean desert asks the monk Zosimas to toss her his cloak (himation) to cover her nudity.3 Lastly, in the Life and Passion of Susanna, dating between the fifth and seventh century, a virgin and future martyr enters the monastery of St. Phillip in Jerusalem in men’s clothing, assuming the name John.4 From the late nineteenth century onwards, hagiography critics took up the question of trans saints. Since the 1970s, feminist scholarship has sought to recover women’s history. It has aimed to excavate the agency of female saints buried under the weight of previous academic conventions. Feminist theory upholds the social agency of women as a subaltern group.5 The narrative of “resistance,” the hallmark of feminist theory, defines its notion of agency. Engaging with the histories of the subjugated and marginalized, feminist scholarship has offered an investigation of the layered complexity of women’s predicaments. What has been especially praiseworthy is its engagement with gender and sexuality, which were previously relegated to the periphery of research. Most recently, transgender theory has equally aimed at recuperating gender-crossing and non-binary subjects as dominated minorities in the past. It often interprets “cross-dressing” saints as trans men. In this paper, I examine, first, how feminist scholarship on late antique hagiography analyzes female agency and resistance in gender and sexual relations in the Life of Pelagia, the Life of Mary of Egypt, and the Life and Passion of Susanna. Second, I examine the attempts of transgender analysts at recuperating trans subjects and their voices in the vitae of trans saints. I argue that one can view the protagonists of the Lives as active social agents – as opposed to seeing them as simply passive victims of masculine ideology – even if they are not successful in challenging patriarchal forms of oppression. Feminist analysis of trans saints confronts a debate about the role of “cross-dressing.” In their legends, Pelagia and Susanna for no apparent reason are said to have dressed as men embarking on a trip to Jerusalem. In feminist writing, they feature in a script that casts them as victims of the patriarchal society they live in, which denies them any sort of agency. Some feminist scholars have argued that 3 4 5 Maria Kouli, trans., “Life of St. Mary of Egypt,” in Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996), 77. For the edition, see Life and Passion of Susanna (BHG 1673): AASS Sept. VI, 153–59. See Robert Mills, “Can the Virgin Martyr Speak?” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 187–213. 2 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 “cross-dressing” diminishes, rather than upholds, saints’ active role as women. In the Lives of these saints, female sainthood is ultimately grounded in suffering and death. Conversely, the same saints have also been read as active agents, highlighting the ways in which they defy the tradition and social roles ascribed to women. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne writes that saints’ lives are open to “resistant readings, which in particular contexts may constitute relative empowerment or recuperation” of women.6 These different readings feature the conflict of interpretation between victimization and resistance that appear to characterize the women’s condition. However, the most significant feature of this debate lies not so much in whether the social norms are enacted or subverted by “cross-dressing,” but in the radically opposite ways in which the norm is supposed to be inhabited. The concern of feminist scholars is to insist that the authors of the Lives regarded these saints as women and sought to present their piety as female piety and their sainthood as female sainthood. While there were authorities to enforce the moral conduct and obligations and penalize infractions, the ascetic movement in early Christianity had a strong individualizing impetus which required a person to adopt a set of austere practices. To an extraordinary degree, it placed emphasis on outward markers of religiosity – namely, dress, ritual practices, styles of comporting oneself – to realize the form of asceticism it was cultivating. Dress was one of the techniques in an elaborate system by which the body was worked on, which required training in this kind of ascetic practice. Whereas for feminist hagiography critics, female saints assume male clothing superficially, as an outward and purely practical symbol, for recent transgender theorists the distinction between outer and inner aspects of the self, which provides a central axis around which ascetic practices are organized, is rather thin, if not altogether invisible. I. FEMINIST THEORY AND AGENCY In liberal accounts regnant notions of agency as closely bound to the notion of resistance exclude certain meanings. Accordingly, if no resistance against oppressive and dominating operations of power is found, concomitantly, agency itself is under question. However, some feminist critics have maintained that the concept of agency should be delinked from the trope of resistance which limits it meaning.7 If there is no resistance, in the sense of direct forms of confrontation, this does not mean that agency never manifests itself. The practices, such as “cross-dressing,” of the participants in the ascetic movement may not necessarily pose a challenge to 6 7 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “The Virgin’s Tale,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), 181. Saba Mahmood, “The Subject of Freedom,” in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1–39. 3 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 the hegemonic norms of late antique society. Despite the challenge of this form of religiosity in its extreme version, women’s agency in the ascetic movement could be seen as a contingent consequence of the effects its theology and practices produced in society. In the late nineteenth century, Hermann Usener identified Pelagia as the original Christian trans saint and a vestige of the hermaphrodite goddess Aphrodite of Cyprus, whose cult featured “cross-dressing.”8 For him, later saints recall Pelagia, with the typical fusion of sexual pleasure and ascetic continence in her Life – characteristic of early trans vitae – as well as the blurring of the gender distinction.9 Hippolyte Delehaye follows Usener in viewing all the legends of trans saints as later variations of the vita of Pelagia, but criticizes its connection to Aphrodite’s cult, pointing to varying celebration dates.10 Thus, Delehaye portrays the Lives of all trans monks as versions of Pelagia’s legend and its “literary replicas,”11 despite the clear difference in their plots. Classified as popular legends, they are viewed by Delehaye as an “unconscious distortion of truth by the people.”12 In the earliest feminist literature on these saints, influenced by Freudian theory, Marie Delcourt revisited the question of early Christian trans saints from a psychoanalytical perspective.13 She rejects Usener’s theory of the Aphroditic origins of the motif,14 and emphasizes their genesis as a reflection of humanity’s hermaphrodism.15 Delcourt views taking on male dress as a break with the “feminine past” of the sex worker. Thus, Pelagia beseeches Nonnos: As she groveled before him, she was throwing dust from the ground onto her head, beseeching him amid loud groans, and saying, “I beg you, have pity on me a sinner. I am a prostitute, a disgusting stone upon which many people have tripped up and gone to perdition. I am Satan’s evil snare: he set me and through me he has caught many people for destruction. I am a ravenous vulture, and many chicks of the heavenly Eagle have been caught by me. I am a sly she-wolf, and by my crafty wiles I have destroyed innocent lambs and sheep. I am a deep ditch of mire in which many have befouled themselves and got filthy: they had been clean, but I corrupted them. Have mercy on me, O pure and holy sir, I beg you; be like your leader Christ, who never averted his face from sinners, but instead out of his graciousness had compassion on them. 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Hermann Usener, Legenden der heiligen Pelagia (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1879). Ibid., 3–16. Delehaye, Legends, illustrates the various steps by which a legend comes into being. Delehaye, ibid., 138–43, emphasizes that certain saints are celebrated on the same dates as those on whom they may have been modeled. Delehaye, ibid., 12, understands the narratives as folkloric developments of what may have been “history.” Marie Delcourt, “Female Saints in Masculine Clothing,” appendix in Hermaphrodite: Myths and Rites of the Bisexual Figure in Classical Antiquity (London: Studio Books, 1961), 84–102. Ibid., 85. Mrie Delcourt, “Le complexe de Diane dans l’hagiographie chrétienne,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 153 (1958): 1–33. 4 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 Pour over me your kindness, imitating him, otherwise I shall perish and die in my sins.”16 Delcourt views Pelagia’s “cross-dressing” to be an outward manifestation of social and sexual tensions in late antique society. She identifies the psychology of early Christian asceticism, and, in this context, she categorizes female “cross-dressing” as psychologically equivalent to male self-castration.17 Although Delcourt argues that since men were regarded as superior to women, the latter had to assume symbolic maleness or at least to adopt an ideal of androgyny if they were to make spiritual progress. For her, saints like Pelagia in any case manifested themselves explicitly by renouncing their femininity, thus breaking the social norms. Thus, even if Delcourt allows for agency – as by assuming male clothing, the heroines of the legends make a radical break with their former lives – she regards them as actively seeking a spiritual ideal in the acceptable (un)gendered form. Contrary to Delcourt, for John Anson, the Lives of these saints are “products of a monastic culture written by monks for monks.”18 Consequently, in Anson’s view, the legends in no way reflect the psychology of the women protagonists – instead, they reflect that of the male authors. This reading precludes altogether the possibility of recuperation of female agency as, according to Anson, the stories do not reflect the psychology of historical late antique women. He studies the vitae as fiction providing a glimpse into early Christian monastic psychology. This psychology is pregnant with intrinsic hostility towards women as seductresses, revealing symptoms of the repressed desire of male anchorites. On this reading, male hagiographers project their own repressed feelings and self-attributes on female figures in their narratives. Pelagia is thus the product of male anxieties regarding women. For Anson, the cutting off of Susanna’s breasts, the whipping, “the tortures that represent wholly new material in the legend, though they have no logical place in iconography, bring to the surface a latent sexual sadism of great psychological interest.”19 The abridged vita of Susanna from the Menologion of Basil II is as follows: The holy martyr Susanna was from the region of Palestine, the daughter of a heathen priest called Artemios. After the death of her father and mother, having been taught the Word of Truth by presbyter Silvanos, she was baptized. Then, having given her wealth to the poor and having left the world, she arrived at a monastery, having put on a male habit and having been renamed John in order not to be discovered. Being considered a man, she was accused by an impelled by the devil woman that she did men’s things to her. And hav- 16 17 18 19 Brock and Harvey, “Pelagia of Antioch,” 49–50. Delcourt, Hermaphrodite, 99–101. John Anson, “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origins and Development of a Motif,” Viator 5 (1974): 5. Ibid., 27. 5 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 ing been examined by a virgin and found to be a woman by nature, she put her accuser to shame. Then having gone to Eleutheropolis, she was ordained a deaconess by the bishop on account of her virtue. Because of the open proclamation of Christ, she was arrested by the governor. And after having been much tortured and thrown into prison, she departed to the Lord.20 Psychoanalytical readings have been criticized for making implicitly transhistorical claims for the theories of sexuality and gender. Feminist scholars have opposed the interpretation that female saints lacked individuality and were strictly molded by gender expectations.21 They have attempted to demonstrate that the women in these stories do not always behave in an expected way towards male authority figures. Even if Pelagia initially attaches herself to Nonnos, she does not follow the new patriarchal figure later on in the narrative. This is also the case with Susanna and Silvanos. These women act of their own will, therefore expressing a type of selfawareness and social autonomy. Their faith and piety are no longer connected to the male figures of bishops, thereby establishing women’s own individuality. Thus, Benedicta Ward dismisses the reading of these legends as rejecting gender, as suggested by Delcourt, or as stories that reflect repressed male sexual desire returning as a symptom of the author’s unconscious, as seen by Anson.22 Starting from the mid-1970s, feminist critics have interpreted trans saints in terms of successful womanhood. They have refused to see “cross-dressing” as the rejection of femininity. Thus, Evelyne Patlagean has studied legends socio-historically as reflecting their contemporary Christian thought and practice.23 She is interested not in the psychology or lived experience of these women, like Delcourt, but, similar to Anson, in the textual and historical development of the “cross-dressing” motif.24 The structuralist reading of the legends applied by Anson and Patlagean has identified the formal elements of the texts and their functions within the late antique social and cultural context. For Patlagean, the “cross-dressing” motif would have challenged the social models of male authority and female subjection in its time. Her feminist reading of the “cross-dressing” saints emphasizes female independence and autonomy. The formulation of agency as resistance presumes a selfconscious agent who constitutes herself by enacting her will and thus asserting her agency against structural forces. But this does not mean that the penitential and ascetic practices of the saints under discussion and the operations that they perform on themselves are products of their independent wills. Rather, these activities 20 21 22 23 24 Menologion of Basil II (PG 117), cols. 60D–61A, translation mine. Laila Abdalla, “Theology and Culture: Masculinizing the Woman,” in Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Susan C. Karant-Nunn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 17–37. See also Susanna Elm, ‘Virgins of God’: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (Oxford: Mowbray, 1987). Evelyne Patlagean, “L’histoire de la femme déguisée en moine et l’évolution de la sainteté feminine à Byzance,” Studi Medievali, ser. 3, 17 (1976): 597–623. Ibid., 622–23. 6 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 are the results of authoritative traditions whose power exceeds the consciousness of the subjects that they enable. For Patlagean, the act of taking on male “disguise” worked as a practical tool that allowed the women to travel and to live as monastics without being hindered or detected. According to her, the legends themselves offer a discursive model of “transgressive sanctity.” This model proposed in the stories by male monks shows “the female” negated through ascetic practice. In Patlagean’s view, women’s “cross-dressing” was equivalent to voluntary mutilation by male ascetics. An ascetic model was a rebellion against the discipline of the organized world of monasteries.25 Patlagean refers to penitential women in monastic anecdotes by Moschos26 as well as secular variations on the theme of Mary the Egyptian. Thus, an effective annihilation of femininity in the aspiration for salvific masculinity is seen as the way to achieve spirituality ordinarily denied for women. The kind of agency that Patlagean recovers here does not belong to the women themselves; it is the outcome of the historically specific context of early Christianity and the discursive traditions in which the protagonists are located. Similarly, Vern L. Bullough stresses that spiritual progress required “giving up the female gender … and taking the active rational male world of mind and thought.”27 For Bullough, too, women’s donning male attire denotes a break with their former existence. Critics like Valerie Hotchkiss likewise point to ideological conformity as women were encouraged to become masculine to gain human value. Pelagia of Antioch and Mary of Egypt reject both their life of sin and their female nature.28 Thus, maleness is assumed to atone for their sexual sins as women. This equals to a denial of female sexuality, the origin of women’s sinfulness. Thus, Mary of Egypt recounts to Zosimas a story of her sexual denouncement: “How can I describe to you, revered father, those thoughts that were urging me again to fornication? Indeed, deep in my miserable heart a burning desire was kindled and set my whole <being> aflame and excited my desire for intercourse. Whenever such a thought came to my mind, I would at once throw myself to the ground and let my tears fall on the earth, imagining that She [the Theotokos] Who had acted as guarantor for me was present as my protector, and that since I was disobeying Her She was <rightly> inflicting punishment on me because of my trespasses. So I did not raise my eyes, but kept them cast down on the ground, even if it happened that I had to spend the whole day and night there, until that sweet light shone around me chasing away those thoughts that disturbed me. Therefore, I constantly raised the eyes 25 26 27 28 Ibid., 597–623. John Moschos, The Spiritual Meadow, trans. John Wortley (Kalamazoo. MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992). Vern L. Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middle Ages,” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 6 (1974): 1383. Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (New York: Garland, 1996). 7 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 of my mind toward my guarantor, seeking Her help for one who was in danger <of drowning> in the sea of the desert. And indeed She always helped and assisted me in my repentance. In this way seventeen years passed by, during which I encountered countless dangers. But from that day until now my helper [i.e., the Virgin] has stood by me and guided me through all <hardships>.”29 “Cross-dressing” is then viewed not only as inversion of gender but as an attempt at its eradication. Pelagia’s solitary confinement and Mary’s reclusive life in the desert “renders sex irrelevant.” Ungendered and asexual, the protagonists of the Lives, according to Hotchkiss, strive for “attainment of superior [i.e., male] spirituality.”30 Similarly, for Ward, Pelagia chose “to enter the monastic world of the desert where gender was, by definition, of no significance at all.”31 Aware of the strength of sexuality, she took care not to present herself in any way as a female. Ward claims that “[t]his has nothing to do with a rejection of femininity; in fact it was an assertion of it,” on a par with the men of the desert.32 Furthermore, Elizabeth Castelli examines the forms of bodily piety in early Christianity containing the motif of women becoming men. She argues that the “cross-dressing” trope reflects in hagiographic literature how late antique society was “reevaluating” and “destabilizing” the ancient gender binary in the theological context that insisted on bodily transformation.33 She points out a strong gnostic influence and identifies the function of these hagiographic texts as an advertising of the denunciation of the material, and by extension, sexual, world. For Castelli, the female “cross-dressing” protagonists are molded by the gnostic theology, as seen in the Gospel of Thomas, in relation to gender crossing and gender blending. According to her, the male “disguise” of the female body in these vitae functions as a bodily signifier of the radical break with the secular world and a manifest “sign of female piety,” challenging gender conventions. The pious subjects of the ascetic movement occupy a decisive yet problematic place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded within the tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status. In the 2000–2010s, scholars turned to poststructuralist theory, studying discourses on gender and the female body. For instance, Stephen Davis argues that the threepart structure of the trans saint legends as identified by Patlagean and Anson is more variable than that proposed by structuralist readings.34 Examining the textual deconstruction and reconstitution of the female body in early Christian literature 29 30 31 32 33 34 Kouli, “Life of St. Mary,” 86. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man, 19–20. Ward, Harlots, 63. Ibid. Elizabeth A. Castelli, “‘I Will Make Mary Male’: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (London: Routledge, 1991), 29–49. Stephen J. Davis, “Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10, no. 1 (2002): 14. 8 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 and tracing intertextual models, Davis rejects the argument that these saints can be understood as actualizing a distinctively female piety. Both Pelagia and Susanna are passing for eunuchs whose piety, for him, is no longer “female” or wholly “male.” Davis concludes that crossed sex of the trans saint “actually destabilizes binary gender categories.”35 Yet feminists have continued the project of recuperation and rescue of female agency in the trans saints’ Lives. Based on the liberal assumptions that a desire for freedom is part of human nature, they have looked for the instances where women seek to assert autonomy despite their subjugation.36 Thus, Laila Abdalla discards the previous views that the hagiographic women achieve a masculine (i.e., superior) status by disallowing inferior attributes of their feminine selves. In the vitae of the “cross-dressing” saints, Abdalla finds their “continued femininity” as spiritual virgins. Pelagia and Susanna “pretend” to be men but excel as women. Even if they transcend their sexuality, they do not transcend their own sex. The saints only take on male clothing yet never deny their female nature. They exhibit female strength and resoluteness, and “subvert” attempts to consign them to a “higher” status. Abdalla writes: The legends challenge the patristic determination of female asceticism as the divestment of feminine affectivity and the assumption of the armour of masculine intellectuality. Hagiographic transvestism thus expresses that which is negated by contemporary authority: the feminine gender, with all its attendant temporal restrictions, is nevertheless special to God. Folklore engages with authority to contend covertly that women serve and venerate God by fulfilling rather than rejecting their inherent qualities.37 For Abdalla, these fictional female characters express something that could not exist in reality, such as the exaltation of the worldly woman as woman. A decade later, a study by Crystal Lynn Lubinsky on intersexuality of the vitae focused on how the texts interpellate women to their normative social roles. With regard to “cross-dressing,” Lubinsky asserts that the masculinization that attends to it, taking men’s names, and passing as men, is not masculinization in any genuine sense.38 The masculinized attributions of virtue and piety do not render female saints men. Lubinsky argues that the “essence of womanhood” is preserved, as well as the “essence of womanly piety” which she finds in the female protagonists throughout the vitae. Lubinsky stresses that even as the protagonists adopt 35 36 37 38 Ibid., 36. See Patricia Cox Miller, “Is There a Harlot in This Text? Hagiography and the Grotesque,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 3 (2003): 419–35. Abdalla, “Theology and Culture,” 18. Crystal Lynn Lubinsky, Removing Masculine Layers to Reveal a Holy Womanhood: The Female Transvestite Monks of Late Antique Eastern Christianity (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 216. 9 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 “masculinized personae,” their holiness should be considered womanly, as it is not fundamentally tied to the new masculine contexts.39 For Lubinsky, the legends are not primarily interested in challenging traditional gender binary, raising women to some newly conceived gendered identity.40 To recuperate “holy womanhood,” Lubinsky argues that “the stories read as action adventures with successful religious female figures as the main characters.”41 The vitae “are constructed from the same intertexts and use layers of masculinity in similar fashion to characterize female protagonists” offering “promotion of a holy womanhood worthy to be an exemplary model for humanity.”42 She explains that the authors of these Lives were working within the limited, masculine vocabulary of sanctity and piety available to them, but the presence of a holy womanhood is revealed as consistent despite the layers of masculinity placed upon it. Lubinsky contends that whereas “outward masculinity” in the legends is “largely functional,” “inward masculinity” is “highly symbolic:”43 [A]n inward masculinization does not occur. Within this examination it becomes clear that hagiographers were more interested in presenting how these holy women were capable of performing as women within the legends. This is proven by hagiographers’ stress on the pragmatism of the transvestic ruses, the continual or residual concern for the loved ones that they had once abandoned, and the perpetuation of ascetic convictions.44 Therefore, rejecting masculinization of the holy women, Lubinsky, like Abdalla, refutes the views of previous critics who assume that the “cross-dressing” motif demonstrates attainment of male religiosity of the female monks as opposed to female piety.45 Abdalla asks why, then, a “cross-dressed” and independent woman is “validated by a religion and culture that iterated a deep suspicion of womankind.”46 Abdalla resolves that, “unlike patristic theology, popular belief did not equate the denial of a woman’s sexuality with a denial of her gender,” because “[a] nonsexual woman is not a man, nor was she perceived as such.”47 The commitment of feminist critics to bringing female agency to the center of scholarship on trans saints is centered on the relationship between social domination 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 Ibid., 220. Kristi Upson-Saia, “Review of Removing Masculine Layers to Reveal a Holy Womanhood: The Female Transvestite Monks of Late Antique Eastern Christianity, by Crystal Lynn Lubinsky,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 23, no. 4 (2015): 631–32. See also Kristi Upson-Saia, “Gender and Narrative Performance in Early Christian Cross-Dressing Saints’ Lives,” Studia Patristica 45 (2010): 43–48. Lubinsky, Removing Masculine Layers, 228. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 221. Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middle Ages,” and Anson, “The Female Transvestite,” discussed above. Abdalla, “Theology and Culture,” 21. Ibid. 10 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 and resistance. As a result, they have viewed female agency as the acts that challenge social norms. Already in the second half of the 1970s, Patlagean argued that the central motif of “cross-dressing” would have challenged late antique social models of male authority and female subjection. What makes Pelagia’s choice, and those of the other protagonists, acts of resistance is that they were intended to undermine male authority. For Patlagean, the image of the “cross-dressing” saint is that of female independence and autonomy, allowing freedom of movement and ascetic belief and practice. Further, Abdalla emphasizes that “cross-dressing” women “achieve liberation from the male sexual gaze … [and] are able to pursue their preferred life role of virgin,” denouncing their sexuality but not their gender.48 This is because women are sexualized by men, as highlighted also in the case of the other “harlots of the desert,” such as Maria the Niece of Abraham and Thaïs. Such stories were deliberately used as a balance to the accounts of vitae of the exemplary women of the monastic world. Thus, according to Abdalla, women actively resist objectification and by means of “cross-dressing” effectively achieve emancipation to pursue the roles they have chosen. For Abdalla, they “purchase the opportunity to be the women they desire to be, not the men that patristic authority required them to be.”49 Male attire protects virginity, as in the case of Susanna, or ensures women’s bodily self-preservation, which, consequently, “grants self-government to the saint.”50 Ascetic continence, in turn, displaces female sexuality while “liberating” women to pursue an avenue to spiritual and social power. As a famous recluse, Pelagia is sought for advice and spiritual counseling. Susanna, in turn, rises to become a deaconess of the nunnery in Eleutheropolis. Lubinsky undertakes to disprove that the saints assimilate masculinity and masculine piety. She thus insists that “cross-dressing” appears to be a choice made out of practicality. Yet feminist scholarship turns it into an act of resistance. However, with regard to female agency, it is possible to recover it without insisting on women’s supposed resistance. Without negating women’s agency, it is possible to accept an interpretation that underlines the constraints under which the heroines live and act. The limited choices they follow cannot be glorified as acts of liberation or anti-authority resistance. The protagonists’ piety, celebrated by the hagiographers, does not turn into an act of resistance against the monastic communities. With regard to the broader society, these Lives do not present a model for women to escape their biological fate. Lynda Coon criticizes the view of “crossdressing” as a revolutionary act,51 because it supposedly enabled women to “escape their social, and indeed their biological destiny.”52 These women are clearly not portrayed struggling against the choice set itself, but only choose between the choices presented to them by society. Moreover, for Coon, subsequent to “disguise,” all the 48 49 50 51 52 Ibid., 21–22. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 22. Lynda L. Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Joyce Salisbury, Church Fathers and Independent Virgins (London: Verso, 1991), 110. 11 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 women, even Pelagia, sustain fundamentally female roles. Therefore, to generate more encompassing arguments about agency itself, one has to decouple it from the notion of resistance, one of the signposts of the liberal feminist theory. II. TRANSGENDER THEORY AND AGENCY A growing consensus in transgender studies is that “trans embodiment is not exclusively, or even primarily, a matter of the materiality of the body,” whether one locates a “transsexual real,” phenomenologically, in the practices – social, medical, legal, etc. – of transition, in narrative, “or even in the unspeakable and unrepresentable aspects of imaging transness.”53 Transness is, among other things, the capacity to produce distinction that precedes constituting subjects/objects “to give meaning to how gender is conceptualized, traversed, and lived.”54 Transgender theory as applied to the early Byzantine world aims to recover the medieval trans and non-binary narratives in the context of their contemporary discourses about gender, sexuality, and structures of power. Queer theory’s application to the Middle Ages has offered new strategies for thinking historically about gender. This theory studies gender construction in the Middle Ages by providing genderqueer readings of texts, images and artifacts of the period. It begins with looking at trans and genderqueer bodies and identities in the medieval period, asking how one can identify queer subjects for study in the past. The emerging field of transgender studies focuses on genderqueer topics, providing trans and nonbinary readings of materials from the Middle Ages, and taking an interdisciplinary approach to readings of subjects and bodies that identify outside or beyond the gender binary. Feminist and queer readings of trans and genderqueer identities, especially at the intersections of race and gender identity in socio-legal contexts, center on the political and legal treatment of trans and non-binary subjects as well as on analyses of power structures and the body politic with relation to trans and genderqueer identities. Following feminist theory, transgender theory promises an excavation of historical subjectivities persisting in the face of obstacles created by hegemonic power structures. Thus, contemporary medieval scholarship inflected by intersectional feminist frameworks and transgender theory explores how marginalized individuals could understand and subvert those power structures in the face of multiple oppressions, and recuperates feminine and queer actors who often exerted creative or subversive forms of agency in medieval societies. Where these subjectivities are 53 54 C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 175. Ibid. 12 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 undocumented, transgender theory centers on recovering trans and queer voices and narratives. Whereas postcolonial studies committed to revealing subaltern voices have broadened the understanding of what constitutes “Middle Ages,” including non-European Middle Ages, critical race theory has sought to examine how agency, as it relates to medieval genders and sexualities, was deployed by racialized actors during the Middle Ages. Thus, intersectional transfeminist scholarship of the medieval period has come to focus on transgressive behaviors and subversive discourses as well as on covert agency, unrecognized resilience, and resistance of historical trans and genderqueer subjects, or at least on their representation in literary and visual narratives. Roland Betancourt has recently argued that recovering trans-masculine figures of late antique “cross-dressing” saints would allow one to recuperate Byzantine nonconforming subjectivities denied in the historical record: “I hope that the reader can respect these figures as men.”55 For him, a series of the saints’ Lives composed in the Greek-speaking Mediterranean from the fifth to the ninth century “detail the lives of individuals assigned female at birth who, for a variety of reasons, choose to live most their lives as monks, usually presenting as male and passing as eunuchs within male monastic communities.”56 He takes these Lives and their popularity in later centuries as a starting point to consider the role of transgender and non-binary figures across the late antique and Byzantine world, covering the Greek, Coptic, and Syriac traditions. Read through contemporary to them rhetorical treatises, letters, and medical textbooks, the authors of these Lives offer eloquent descriptions of non-binary and transgender identities, both for themselves and others. According to Betancourt, the figures discussed in these vitae undercut expectations of gender identity in the medieval world, rubbing against our own anachronistic notions of a binary gender construct, and demanding a revaluation of what transgender subjectivities could have looked like in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. That some of the early Christian ascetics saw themselves as men throughout their time in the desert is a point emphasized in the sayings attributed to them by the compilers of the relevant textual collections. For instance, in the fifth-century Apophthegmata Patrum, Amma Sarah, who lived alone in the Egyptian desert for sixty years, although without “cross-dressing,” reportedly told some visiting monks, “It is I who am a man, you who are women.”57 Commenting on the sayings, Ward admits the viability of “[t]he idea of ‘becoming a man’ through undertaking monastic life.”58 55 56 57 58 Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 120. Ibid., 90. Benedicta Ward, trans., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 230, Sarah 9. Ward, Harlots, 63. 13 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 Most famously, Perpetua’s vision in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, where she “becomes a man,” is one of the many cases where a female saint is said to have a “man’s soul in a woman’s body.”59 This is a persistent trope in early hagiography.60 In 1997, Paul Halsall was the first to use the term “transgender saints” in reference to late antique vitae that have “cross-dressing” as their central motif; the notion of “transvestite saints” had been used to refer to them in a number of articles long before that. For Halsall, the protagonists of these Lives can be called “transgendered.” Clearly, these saints were not forcibly dressed as men.61 But even if the choice results more from male agency rather than from female empowerment, women are left to make the choice. For Betancourt, the various vitae of saints born as women who lived dressed as monks can be seen as representing the lives of trans men. He claims that these texts showed the existence of transgender ideas in Byzantium, and that the Byzantines were aware of people whose gender did not match their sex assigned at birth. He argues that one must acknowledge that transgender subjectivities existed in Byzantium and were widely recognized to the extent that these identities in fact were not even perceived as “queer.” In this regard he discusses the Life of Pelagia. In Betancourt’s words, “[i]n the story of Pelagius, for example, the author infuses the narrative with conflicts in his gender presentation, even when he is passing as a cis woman.”62 To corroborate this argument, Betancourt explains that Pelagios had begun his transition long before entering the male lavra. The scholar views the protagonist, a wealthy sex worker, as passing as female for his male lovers, and for the broader world, thus introducing a new dimension of same-gender desire, which is not present in the vita. The readers of the Life are told that Pelagia is a woman conscious of her sinful femininity who is passing as a man for the male monastic community to atone for her female sins.63 With regard to Mary of Egypt, Betancourt concedes that she is “a female saint who is not explicitly understood as being transgender,” but whose figure is often depicted with masculine features in Byzantine art, while the transgender saints are invariably commemorated in art as women in Byzantium.64 Byzantine artists sought to depict her as transmasculine in presentation of her gender, while she is not portrayed in her vita as a transgender man or eunuch, unlike the protagonists 59 60 61 62 63 64 L. Stephanie Cobb, ed., The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas in Late Antiquity, trans. Andrew S. Jacobs and L. Stephanie Cobb (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021). Paul Halsall, “Women’s Bodies, Men’s Souls: Sanctity and Gender in Byzantium” (PhD diss., Fordham University, 1999). Paul Halsall, “Calendar of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Saints,” (October 1997), http:// www.otkenyer.hu/halsall/lgbh-gaysts.html#tv. Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality, 101. See Mariana Bodnaruk, “Intersecting Inequalities: The Representation of Religious, Gender, and Sexual Identities in the Life of Pelagia,” Review of Ecumenical Studies 13, no. 3 (2021): 419–36. Roland Betancourt, “Transgender Lives in the Middle Ages through Art, Literature, and Medicine,” The Getty Iris (blog), March 6, 2019, https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/outcasts/downloads/betancourt_transgender_lives.pdf. 14 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 of the trans saints’ Lives, albeit she is said to behave in a masculine way by the hagiographer.65 For Felix Szabo, of extant saints’ vitae, only Mary/Marinos could be counted as a trans saint properly, as his life was spent entirely within a male monastery, unlike other saints whose activity in monasteries was usually brief.66 However, according to the vita, Susanna/John spent around twenty years as a male monk in the monastic community of St. Phillip before “detransitioning.” When Susanna was dressed as a man for twenty years, it is hard to argue that she was being “forced” in some way to “cross-dress.” Yet Betancourt’s reading acknowledges that some protagonists, like Susanna, see themselves as women throughout their time in the monastery. This is the point accentuated by the author of the vita: “It happened that she spent many years, around twenty, in this great conduct and nobody could have known during such a [long] time that she was a woman.”67 Comparing the narratives of Marinos and Dorotheos in their different commitments to live and die as men, and the story of Matrona68 and Susanna, who after about twenty years in the male monastery chooses to continue her religious life as a woman, one can discern the different contours of these figures’ gender identities. While some of them become abbots of male monasteries, Susanna is ordained deaconess of the nunnery in Eleutheropolis. In the Life and Passion of Susanna, the protagonist, who has taken on the name John, is accused of being responsible for a pregnancy, but when a trial begins she uncovers her female nature as well as her virginity. Confronted by bishop Kleopas, Susanna reveals her gender identity: Rising from the ground, she said to the bishop: “I beg you in the Lord, sir, call quickly for two deaconesses and two virgins. I have something to show them which will deal with your concern.” The bishop sent immediately to Eleutheropolis, to send quickly two deaconesses and two virgins. When they arrived, the holy Susanna took them and went into the diakonikon of the monastery, and disrobing before them, she showed them that she was female by nature and a virgin like them from birth. In order to save her soul, she had put on the angelic habit and changed her name to John, though her real name was Susan- 65 66 67 68 Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality, 2–13. Felix Szabo, “Non-Standard Masculinity and Sainthood in Niketas David’s Life of Patriarch Ignatios,” in Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, ed. Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 112–13. Life and Passion of Susanna (BHG 1673), ch. 5: AASS Sept. VI (1757): 154; Stavroula Constantinou, Female Corporeal Performances: Reading the Body in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Holy Women (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2005), 112. See also Stavroula Constantinou, “Holy Actors and Actresses: Fools and Cross-Dressers as the Protagonists of Saints’ Lives,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, vol. 2, Genres and Contexts, ed. Stephanos Efthymiadis (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 343–62. See Khalifa Bennasser, “Gender and Sanctity in Early Byzantine Monasticism: A Study of the Phenomenon of Female Ascetics in Male Monastic Habit with a Translation of the Life of St. Matrona” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1984). 15 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 na. Those honorable women, seeing and hearing these things, cried out in astonishment with a loud voice, saying: “Great is God who gave you this gift and perseverance!” When the bishop, monks, and laity with them heard the cry, they were disturbed and ran to know why the cry had arisen, for they thought that something shameful had happened to them. Then the deaconesses and virgins went to the bishop and said: “Truly we have seen a new Susanna!”69 Instead of falsely confessing to her crime or revealing the truth in private to the bishop so that she might resume her male monastic life, as did Marinos and Dorotheos, she denudes herself and declares her gender identity as female and her name Susanna. While some saints, such as Pelagios, commit fully to their transgender identities until death, Susanna resumes her life as a woman even after a lengthy period of time spent in the male monastery. The vitae underscore the complexity of same-gender desire when the trans monks become the object of attraction for women. The legends are clear that it is the masculinity of these individuals that attracts women’s desire. According to the hagiographers, the women ostensibly are attracted to trans monks not as to other women but rather to a transcendent masculinity made manifest in these saints. While a desire for intimacy between these women and a trans monk or male eunuch is clearly present, the authors purposely short-circuit the representation of this desire by ascribing its origin to the brother’s masculine features: “By doing so, such intimacies are staged as being rooted only in a heterosexual impulse.”70 With the writer’s insistence on the saint’s female identity in the Life and Passion of Susanna, a woman’s desire for the trans saint is doubly problematic: first, it is a same-gender desire of one woman for another; and second, it is a woman’s desire to fornicate with a monk. However, the story makes it clear that the woman made her advances not knowing that Susanna was a woman. Hence, it would seem that while the monks perceive the saint’s femininity under John’s masculine gender expression, the woman perceives and is seduced by his male appearance. For Betancourt, the complexity of sexual desire compels one to recognize queer sensations/desire in the premodern world. Betancourt insists that “[a]cknowledging and respecting trans monks as men necessitates that we move away from the language of ‘same-sex desire’ used in the secondary literature” as the “assumptions underlying the category of ‘same-sex desire’ are fundamentally transphobic; they exclude non-cisgender persons from the possibility of same-gender intimacies.”71 He proposes a more encompassing term, “queer desire,” which would prevent excluding non-binary figures from these intimacies. Betancourt argues that “the figures of transgender saints … provide a rhetorical space in which the same-gender desires of monks can be openly displayed, 69 70 71 Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek, eds. and trans., Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 55. Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality, 127. Ibid. 16 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 particularly when directed toward the youthful and feminine faces of these transgender men passing as eunuchs.”72 In the Life and Passion of Susanna, when an ascetic woman from Eleutheropolis attempts to sleep with the monk, the author is able to reveal same-gender desire, which only the reader and the protagonist can recognize. Having found no way to seduce the monk, she accuses John of rape. The false accusation leads to the discovery of his female sex. An unbridled hypersexuality of the lascivious nun visiting the male monastery, which in the story is associated with the evil and corrupt nature of her soul, is construed as triply wrongful, since it is coming from a female ascetic with her attempt at fornication, fixated on a monk as an object of sexual desire, and, ultimately, is understood as being directed toward the same gender. Eventually, the monk-tempting woman suffers retribution and is almost killed by the brothers with stones, saved only by Susanna’s intercession before the bishop. This extreme punishment serves as a sharp reminder of the dangers of monastic desire. As regards the transgender hagiographic narratives, these are notable for mostly being written during the period of late antiquity. Jules Gleeson explains that their characters are identifiable “trans men,” as Betancourt qualifies them, by “presentist” standards insofar as they were raised as girls, then adopted new names/personae and attire. They did not undergo physical transformation on an anatomical level, either by means of surgeries or miracles, and indeed the most common way for these narratives to end was with their cadaver giving away the “deception” they had effected to their former brothers after death, after which they were acclaimed as a saint. Importantly, these are narratives about transgressive girls-to-men (or women-to-eunuchs), and as such best serve as guides to tales contemporary authors and audiences found compelling.73 Ultimately, Betancourt claims that while the hagiographic figures discussed here are literary, his goal is “to allow them an agency beyond the page that treats them as real and viable possibilities for lived subjectivities.”74 He militates: “To deny them such agency and plausibility beyond the page would be to continue to deny the feasibility of trans identities in the medieval world and to promote the notion that trans and nonbinary subjects are a modern invention.”75 Despite unbending claims like these, Betancourt is compelled to acknowledge that these fictional texts may not necessarily attest to actual historical populations, but insists that they at least provided material with which medieval readers could “shape their own subjectivity.”76 In any case, with regard to transgender saints, it is difficult to 72 73 74 75 76 Ibid., 181. Jules Gleeson, “Roland Betancourt – Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages,” Oxford Art Journal 44, no. 2 (2021): 335–39. By the standards of most trans communities today, undergoing hormonal treatment is not required for someone to be considered and accepted as trans, although there may be a widespread expectation that one will do this if possible. Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality, 91. Ibid. Ibid., 120; Gleeson, “Roland Betancourt,” 136. 17 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 claim the individuals’ lack of agency in their own sexing/gendering, which was not directly, externally imposed on them by society. CONCLUSION Gender and sexuality have been central analytical foci of feminist theory since its inception. The feminist analysis foregrounds these forms of oppression and forms of social agency that have tended to remain at the periphery of consideration. With gender and sexuality reinstated into a reading of late antique hagiography, feminist critics have aimed to excavate the sources of female agency. I have shown that their notion of women’s agency is essentially tied to the concept of resistance to patriarchal ideology. That notion is irredeemably flawed as it is viewed with regard to the relationship between social domination and resistance, with gender and sexuality conceptualized as a site of struggle within this analytical framework. The ways in which feminist scholars view agency have rarely been debated. These scholars seek to establish the central role of gender and sexuality simultaneously as a site of oppression and a source of resistance. I argue that one must forgo simply celebrating female agency and instead endeavor to scrutinize the constraints of action and the marginal status of the agents of such acts, without coupling agency with resistance. Examining how feminist scholars conceptualize women’s resistance in the trans saints’ vitae, and how it takes specific shape around gender, I argue that it is possible to recuperate female agency without maintaining women’s supposed resistance to the social order they lived in. However, the absence of resistance of the dominated, embodied in trans performance and everyday practice, should not obscure the small acts of resistance conducted by these saints. But these acts of resistance are performed within the context of relations of domination and do not exist as external to them. Acknowledging the impossibility of recovering the lived experiences of Byzantine gender-crossing individuals, I do not attempt to mine the Lives for resistant readings. Yet, while recognizing the fictional representation of the trans saints, I hope that the instances of insurgency and contestation as well as the small acts of resistance found in these accounts would be politically expedient and help to re-envision our own gender categories. Transgender theory offers new perspectives on how one can identify trans and non-binary narratives in the past, exploring theoretical discourses around nonnormative bodies and identities in the Middle Ages, historical constructions of trans and non-binary narratives, scientific and medical approaches to trans and non-binary gender, and trans and non-binary readings and analysis of literary texts and iconography. If one aims to recover historical trans subjectivities, one is 18 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 required to consider carefully the notion of agency and to do more than “endow” the oppressed and marginalized minorities with agency. With the powerful social constraints of agency in late antiquity, it is difficult to imagine how the interpellation of trans and non-binary individuals as subjects enables forms of agency that do not reinscribe the terms of subjection. With challenges to facile assertions of agency of these subjugated groups and doubt cast on the capaciousness of transgression in a state of social domination,77 I argue that the strategies of the latter do not preclude the myriad of ways in which agency is exercised without necessarily undermining the conditions of oppression. The line between dominant and insurgent orchestrations of transness could be effaced or fortified depending on the purposes for which individuals utilized “cross-dressing”. Abbreviations AASS = Acta Sanctorum (Brussels 1643–). BHG = Halkin, François, ed. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca. 3rd ed. 3 vols. Subsidia Hagiographica 8a. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957. PG = Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca. 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Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 54–56. 19 CEEOL copyright 2023 CEEOL copyright 2023 CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 13 Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Intersecting Inequalities: The Representation of Religious, Gender, and Sexual Identities in the Life of Pelagia.” Review of Ecumenical Studies 13, no. 3 (2021): 419–36. Brock, Sebastian O., and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, trans. “Pelagia of Antioch.” In Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, trans. Brock and Harvey, 41–62. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987. Bullough, Vern L. “Transvestites in the Middle Ages.” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 6 (1974): 1381–94. Castelli, Elizabeth A. “‘I Will Make Mary Male’: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity.” In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 29–49. London: Routledge, 1991. Cobb, L. 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Szabo, Felix. “Non-Standard Masculinity and Sainthood in Niketas David’s Life of Patriarch Ignatios.” In Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, 109–29. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Upson-Saia, Kristi. “Gender and Narrative Performance in Early Christian Cross-Dressing Saints’ Lives.” Studia Patristica 45 (2010): 43–48. ———. “Review of Removing Masculine Layers to Reveal a Holy Womanhood: The Female Transvestite Monks of Late Antique Eastern Christianity, by Crystal Lynn Lubinsky.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 23, no. 4 (2015): 631–32. Usener, Hermann. Legenden der heiligen Pelagia. Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1879. Ward, Benedicta. Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources. Oxford: Mowbray, 1987. ———, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn. “The Virgin’s Tale.” In Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, edited by Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, 165–94. London: Routledge, 1994. Biographical note Mariana Bodnaruk received their PhD in Medieval Studies from the Central European University (Budapest) in 2019. Since 2019 they are Visiting Assistant Professor at the Al-Quds Bard College, East Jerusalem. Their research interests are focused on the social and cultural history of late antiquity, epigraphy, Byzantine hagiography and iconography, history of precapitalist modes of production, and Marxist intersectional feminism. Their publications include: “Late Antique Slavery in Epigraphic Evidence,” in Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150–700 CE, ed. Chris L. de Wet, Maijastina Kahlos, and Ville Vuolanto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 224–48; “Damnatio Memoriae of the High-Ranking Senatorial Office-Holders in the Later Roman Empire, 337–415,” in Fragmented Memory: Omission, Selection, and Loss in Ancient and Medieval Literature and History, ed. Nicoletta Bruno, Martina Filosa, and Giulia Marinelli (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), 185–214; and An Empire of Elites: The Self-Representation of the Senatorial Aristocracy in the Later Roman State in the Fourth Century AD (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 21 CEEOL copyright 2023