Events archive
Dr Colby Gordon: "Samson, The Transgender Craze: Milton and the Legal Histories of Transphobia"
Co-hosted by the Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies (CEMMS), Queory (Sex Diss), and the English Colloquium.
Abstract:
This talk takes up a paranoid fantasy characteristic of the contemporary landscape of transphobia: the image of the trans child as confused, deceived, or seduced into a transition framed as bodily mutilation. Transphobic activists and legislatures have warded off this spectre by invoking an outmoded criminal charge sourced from early modernity: mayhem, the legal prohibition against disabling injury. Pairing Milton with Coke, I approach Samson Agonistes as an investigation into the gendered dimensions of criminal mayhem and the state’s seizure of bodily capacities—particularly the ability to reproduce. Samson’s extended minority—and the emasculating cut that definitively ends it—offers unique points of entry into ongoing conversations about the legal histories of transphobia, as well as the possibilities embedded in what Cameron Awkward-Rich calls “trans/crip conjunctions.”
Colby Gordon is an assistant professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College. He has published essays on prosthetic bodies, transgender embodiment, and creation narratives in Shakespeare's sonnets; trans confession and lyric obscurity in the poetry of John Donne; trans animality in The Duchess of Malfi; bleeding Eucharists and host desecration narratives; housebreaking and the sanctity of the home in The Comedy of Errors; soft architecture and queer futurity in Antony and Cleopatra; political aesthetics and The Tempest's soundscapes; and Carl Schmitt, Sianne Ngai, and the aesthetics of political theology. With Simone Chess and Will Fisher, he edited a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies on early modern trans studies. Gordon is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature.
Please contact Samuel Solomon for the Zoom link (samuel.solomon@sussex.ac.uk)
