Desiring Indigeneity in the Trans Middle Ages

How was 'transgender' imagined in the premodern past? In this talk, Dr. Price argues that turning to the archives of medieval Fennoscandia reveals a prehistory of 'transgender' as a racial category. Despite the growing field of premodern critical race studies and simultaneous but – rarely intersecting – trans and Indigenous critical ‘turns’, medievalists have only just begun to consider the intersections of transness and racialization, even as trans-of-color and Indigenous scholars have identified how the processes of racialization and colonialism provide a critical genealogy for modern transness. Yet the recuperative aims of trans history mean that academics and activists risk an extractive relationship with racialized pasts, by identifying these histories primarily as resources for the articulation and visibility of more privileged transgender subjects. In this talk, Dr. Price intervenes by suggesting that transness – and specifically, racialized transness – is an object of desire within both the medieval and modern imaginary.

Dr. Basil Arnould Price is an Assistant Professor of Queer and Medieval Literature at SUNY Oneonta. Prior to joining SUNY Oneonta, Price was the inaugural John W. Baldwin Postdoctoral Fellow in the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is now an affiliate faculty member. He received his PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of York, where he is now an Associate Researcher in the Centre for Medieval Studies. His research broadly focuses on negative affect and its intersections with colonialism, racialisation, and trans embodiments in the premodern North Atlantic, through the archive of Old Norse literature. Price is the first editor of the co-edited volume Medieval Mobilities (Palgrave, 2023) and is also an Associate Editor for the peer-reviewed journal Medieval Feminist Forum.

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Host or Publisher History and Greek & Roman Studies Departmental Graduate Association