Why read The Shape of Sex?

Book cover of The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance

Book description

The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200-1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define "the human" so often hinged…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Shape of Sex as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Julie Hardwick

Author

We might think that ideas about nonbinary gender identifications are a recent phenomenon, but Lead Devun does an amazing job of exploring the deep history of this kind of sexuality between the fifth and fifteenth centuries in Europe. Just as our society now finds embracing non-binary gender identification challenging at times, Devun shows how attitudes towards and practices of nonbinary sexuality changed dramatically over the course of the medieval millennium.

From Julie's list on The best books on the history of sex to understand where we are now.