Search results

Intro -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Unit 1 -- Chapter 1 -- Unit 2 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Unit 3 -- Chapter 7 -- Chapter 8 -- Chapter 9 -- Chapter 10 -- Chapter 11 -- Chapter 12 -- Chapter 13 -- Chapter 14 -- Unit 4 -- Chapter 15 -- Notes -- References -- Index

AbstractThis essay observes that a hostile relationship to religion is an elemental component of contemporary debates about gender and sexuality, and this hostility has its origin in a specific movement, freethought. A long line of Anglophone self-described freethinkers argues that human beings embrace religions because they cannot think without direction. TERF voices echo this explanation as they seek to right what they determine are wrong figurations of gender. The freethinker's ritual presentation requires standing at a pulpit determined by their claimed associations with and commitment to reason, and then correcting someone else's view of themselves with a red pen in front of a crowd. Understanding TERFs, and their ability to declare what gender is and is not, requires a foray into the history of religions to perceive why this is such a tenacious prejudicial rite of modernity.

AbstractThe eighteenth-century Atlantic world was swept with a radical new form of Christian preaching that aimed to engage the feelings and sensations of mass audiences. In the nineteenth century, this heart-centered preaching became a mainstream form of American Christianity, but in its first hundred years, it was widely regarded as perverse, effeminate, and depraved. Early evangelical Christianity threatened to destabilize social and political orders, to drive the masses "out of their senses," and to throw gender norms into chaos. This article argues that attention to "trans tonality"—an investigation of trans at the level of tone, expression, and sensation—offers a surprising trans history of early American culture and opens up an archive rich with accounts of gender and sensory variance.