Premodern Intersectionality Marginal Identities in Early Cultures


 The Center for Early Cultures     Mar 6 2018 | 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM Humanities Gateway 1030

Premodern Intersectionality: Marginal Identities in Early Cultures

Tuesday | March 6, 2018
10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Humanities Gateway 1030

Committed to the idea of giving articulation to marginalized issues within the history of the premodern world, Premodern Intersectionality demonstrates the longstanding conversations in medieval thought around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, sexual-shaming, respectability politics, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, transgender and non-binary gender identifications, the representation of disability/ableism, and the systematic oppression of peoples through state-sponsored brutality. Reading against the grain of modern expectations for the premodern world, this conference looks at representations of these problems from antiquity up to the early modern period.


Event Schedule

Introduction: Intersectional Pasts | 10:00 - 10:15 a.m.

Lyle Massey (UC Irvine), Opening Remarks
Roland Betancourt (UC Irvine), Introduction

I. Ancient | 10:15 - 11:35 a.m.

The King’s Speech: Intersectionality in the Narratives of Battus I, Founder of Cyrene

Walter Duvall Penrose, Jr.
Associate Professor of History (San Diego State University)


Staging Intersectionality in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis

Zina Giannopoulou
Associate Professor of Classics (UC Irvine)


Break: 11:35 - 11:50 a.m.

II. Medieval and Byzantine | 11:50 - 1:10 p.m.

Gregory the Great: Eschatological Intersections

Ben Garceau
Lecturer in Humanities Core Program (UC Irvine)


The Racial Difference of Transgender Identity in Byzantium

Roland Betancourt
Assistant Professor of Art History (UC Irvine)


Lunch Break: 1:10 - 2:30 p.m.

III. Late Medieval to Today | 2:30 - 3:50 p.m.

Blackness, the Ethiopian, and St. Margaret

Dorothy Kim
Assistant Professor of English (Vassar College)


The Transgender Turn: On the Dysphoria of Medieval Studies

Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski
Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow (Case Western Reserve University)


Break: 3:50 - 4:05 p.m.

Closing Roundtable: Intersectional Futures | 4:05 - 5:00 p.m.

Questions about the event? Email Roland Betancourt, assistant professor of art history, at rbetanc1@uci.edu

Sponsored by the Humanities Commons, the Center for Early Cultures, and the Art History Department