Fragment: Toward a Critical Trans History of Byzantium[1]

We need a critical trans politics that perpetually questions its own effectiveness, that refuses to take for granted stories about what counts as change that actually maintain certain structures and categories. We need a critical trans politics that is about practice and process rather than arrival at a singular point of “liberation.” To practice this politics we have to tackle some big questions about what law is, what power is, how legal systems are part of the distribution of life chances, and what role changing laws can and cannot have in changing the arrangements that cause such harm to trans people.

– Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (2015)

In my current research, I have been looking at how saints’ lives, medical handbooks, letters, and art are articulate and self-aware about the various ways in which gender identity can be affirmed through both ascetic and surgical practices. Yet, turning to Dean Spade’s call for a critical trans politics, I have been repeatedly drawn to the necessity of moving beyond this baseline approach. In this fragment, I wish to walk us through some of my initial observations and then go on to stress the need to rework our categories of gender and sexuality altogether. My interest here is precisely in how fragments themselves can constitute lives and identities, since the scraps and snippets that fragments offer often can be more loquacious about subjectivities expunged or willfully forgotten from the official historical records.

In other words, fragments offer sites of resistance for what the archive refuses to offer us. Given the historical archive’s push toward normative narratives, queer historical tasks such as this require close reading and careful scrutiny of what has been labeled minor. As Elizabeth Freeman has eloquently put it, queer history necessitates “the decision to unfold, slowly, a small number of imaginative texts.” [2] The fragment allows us to upset the absences of archive and to grasp at lives, purposefully and shamefully erased and denied. “To read without a trace,” as Anjali Arondekar calls it, is a way of embracing the condition of fragmentation from which the archive comes, working through the seductions of a retrieval or recuperation of minoritized lives and historiographies.[3]

* * *

In the Coptic narrative of Hilarion, we encounter a series of tropes found across the narratives of trans monks: that is, figures who were assigned female at birth, but chose to live their lives as men, passing as male eunuchs in monastic communities. This text details the gender transformation of the body to affirm the monk’s transmasculinity:

After nine years, they saw that the young girl was beardless and they called her ‘Hilarion the Eunuch’ since there were many such [eunuchs] wearing the habit. For her breasts, too, they were not as those of all women. Above all, she was shrunken with ascetic practices and even her menstrual period had stopped because of the deprivation.”[4]

Here, the author has chosen to focus on the physical effects of the monk’s transition: the cessation of menstruation, the withering of breasts, and the alteration of facial complexions all recur throughout these narratives. In the case of Hilarion, the author emphasizes that he had stop menstruating and that his breasts were “not as those of all women.” This latter detail is repeated in the story of another trans monk, Anastasius, which explicitly tells us that as a brother was dressing him after his death, the brother “saw that on his chest he had women’s breasts, looking like two shriveled up leaves,” a detail preserved verbatim in both the Syriac and Greek versions of the text.[5]

To consider the masculinization of the body through asceticism we can look at the case of Mary of Egypt. Mary of Egypt is a cis woman who is not explicitly understood as being transgender, but who is often depicted as trans-masculine. While the transgender monks discussed herein are invariably commemorated in Byzantine art as women, the figure of Mary of Egypt is often depicted with masculine features.[6] In the seventh-century story of her life Mary is depicted as a reformed sex-worker, who escapes into the desert to find salvation. She emerges in the story when the monk Zosimas catches a glance of her figure.[7] As Zosimas pursues her, she attempts to flee, eventually being overrun and asking him to toss her his cloak for she is a woman and should not be seen naked.[8]

In depicting her great asceticism, artists often produced a body for Mary of Egypt that was visually synonymous with that of her male counterparts. Compare the image of Mary of Egypt in the sanctuary of the Church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa at Asinou in Cyprus with that of John the Baptist just outside the sanctuary of the same church (figs. 1 and 2). The similarity between the two figures in these frescoes is striking. Both wear a scrappy tan-colored garment over their emaciated bodies: John’s tunic is shredded at the hems, while Mary’s is haphazardly tossed over her flesh, wrapped as a himation, but without the chiton underneath. Her garment, which Zosimas has tossed to her to cover herself up, is much finer than John’s, neither tattered nor torn, with subtle instances of visible embroidery at the hems. Mary’s white hair is voluminous, twisting and turning over her profile in a shaggy manner, with what can only be described as a disheveled pompadour on top that echoes that of John. And while John’s body is just as thin and petite as that of Mary, her denuded chest and back reveal a gruesomely famished body, her ribs are prominently visible and thick blobs of paint mark every single one of her vertebrae over a pronounced hunchback.

Looking at these two images, we are left with the nagging realization that John’s body is more feminine according to Byzantine tropes than Mary’s. John’s own hair is longer than Mary’s, reaching well past his shoulders, and it falls into locks of thick glossy curls. Mary’s body shows no indication of breasts, her tunic falling flatly over her chest as it does with John, and there even seems to be a thin swirl of color beside her armpit that might allude to the semblance of withered breasts, that feature memorably recounted in some of the trans-saints’ lives. On her face, the weight of her excess flesh and wrinkles pull down her jawline. Compare the soft and rounded face of the Virgin Mary, standing next to John, with Mary of Egypt’s own. The ascetic has no roundness to her. The streams of paint that contour her drooping and wrinkled face flow down from between the utmost tip of her ear and eye, coming down at a soft right-angle at her jawline, thus giving her a rigidly square jaw. This jaw culminates upon a strong and prominent chin, unlike the Virgin’s soft and rounded features. Her brow is furrowed with contours and shadows, unlike the serenely plastic brow of the Virgin. In every manner, the artist has sought to make Mary male. John’s legs, arms, and feet are covered with body hair, indicated by thin long strips of black paint. Mary’s body is lacerated with similar lines: thicker and shorter brownish-red stripes of paint that even cover her back, yet notably not the palms of her hands. Seemingly, then, her flesh is also covered in body hair. In this ambiguity between scar and hair, the lacerations of asceticism transmute into the secondary sex characteristics of the male body. Symbolically and spiritually, the two are one and the same.

Fig. 3: Mary of Egypt and Zosimas. London, British Library, Theodore Psalter (Add. Ms. 19352), fol. 68r.

In the Theodore Psalter, glossing Psalm 54, is the encounter between Zosimas and Mary (fol. 68r; fig. 3). The exchange is captured precisely at the moment that he has tossed the garment toward her, the cloth having just left his hands. Zosimas looks away, while Mary turns back to catch his himation, thus exposing her denuded chest to the viewer while her right thigh preserves the modesty of her loins. A close inspection of her chest demonstrates that there is again no indication of breasts, neither full nor wither. Instead, a reddish undulating thick-brushstroke crosses over her chest, armpit to armpit, like some pronounced wound. Instead of breasts, it looks more like the mottled dark-red of cauterized scar tissue.

In fact, this type of scaring would be in keeping with Byzantine mastectomies that involved a process of alternative cutting and cauterizing according to the medical and surgical handbooks, such as is prescribed in Aetios of Amida’s sixth-century text in the chapters describing mastectomies and the removal of breast cancer (fig. 4).[9]

Fig. 5: Martyrdom of Agatha. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ‘Menologion’ of Basil II (Vat. gr. 1613), p. 373.

We can compare the scar-like trace on Mary’s body to an earlier image of Saint Agatha’s torture in the ‘Menologion’ of Basil II (p. 373; fig. 5). There, we see two men torturing the saint by cutting off her breasts, not with pincers as it is often shown, but with a striking half-moon knife. This knife is a lunellum, associated with the scraping and cleaning of animal skin in the making of parchment, thus a tool connected with the working of flesh for a scribe and illuminator (fig. 6 and 7). In the miniature, Agatha’s recently cut-off breast has fallen on to the ground to the left of the figure, while the man there approaches her with a torch that is about to be pressed against the wound where her right breast was; seemingly in order to cauterize the open lesion.

Fig. 8: Martyrdom of Melasippos, Karina, and their Son. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ‘Menologion’ of Basil II (Vat. gr. 1613), p. 165.

In other words, we are seeing here the manner in which the painters are conceptualizing the process through the types of tools and methods they would have been more familiar with regarding the working and manufacturing of animal skins for parchment. The depiction of Agatha’s linear wound and its height right at her armpit are comparable to what we observed in Mary of Egypt’s curious depiction in the Theodore Psalter. And, looking at the scene including the martyrdom of Karina in the ‘Menologion’ as well (p. 165; fig. 8), we can find a striking parallel between the oval wounds upon Karina’s chest and the odd eye-like form upon Mary of Egypt’s chest in the Asinou portrait. These wounds are in keeping with contemporaneous medical instructions for the cutting of breasts for mastectomies, as we see in these diagrammatic reconstructions. And, in looking across these depictions, there is a carefully articulated transmasculinity, informed by medical theories on gender at the time.

However, thinking through Dean Spade’s work, it became evidently clear that acknowledging and respecting trans monks as men necessitates that we move away from a language of “same-sex desire” in the secondary literature. The assumptions made by the category of “same-sex desire” are fundamentally trans-exclusionary in as far as they remove non-cis-gender persons from partaking in same-gender desires and other queer intimacies. Intriguingly, some of the more unabashedly descriptive accounts of same-gender desire in the Byzantine world appear in the lives of trans monks, where the monks’ trans identity allows authors to unabashedly confront these figures as the recipients of both male and female sexual interest.

In the story of Smaragdos, for example, the appearance of the eunuch-passing trans monk into the monastery poses a threat to his brothers who are wrought with a same-gender desire for the young, beardless monk.[10] The story here does not marvel at this fact. Instead, the situation is handled with a clearly established plan: isolate the monk and limit his contact with others in a highly regulated environment. The challenges of youthful, beardless monks were a well-established problem for monastic communities. From Cyril of Scythopolis to Paphnutius, we have accounts of anxieties of eunuchs or femme monks – a “feminine face” – dwelling in monasteries.[11] On the part of these authors, the fellow monks are ostensibly not attracted to other men, but rather to a transcendent femininity.

In opting for a more capacious language of sexuality and desire, I am interested in counting relations beyond “straight” between non-binary, trans, and cis-gender persons, as well as those intimacies undertaken by non-cis-gender people. We must also understand that queer intimacy need not be affirmed by sexual intercourse, just as gender need not be confirmed by medical, cosmetic, or legal practices. In turn, this permits us to count demisexual, asexual, aromantic, and even antisexual subjectivities as queer subjectivities. Ancient, late-antique, and medieval history has done far too little to grapple with queered desire in a manner that it inclusive of a variety of gender identities – and it has also all but erased or ignored asexual subjectivities as valid sexualities. We cannot have a representation of trans/gender-variant lives in the past without first creating room for these lives to wholly reconfigure the categories of gender as well as those of sexuality, desire, and intimacy.

Roland Betancourt is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine.

[1] This is a fragment of my forthcoming book Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

[2] See Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xvii.

[3] Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 1-25, at 4.

[4] Anonymous, The Life of Hilarion, modified trans. James Drescher, “Hilaria,” Three Coptic Legends (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1947), 69-82, at 75 and 77.

[5] Life of Anastasius, 7, trans. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Sebastian P. Brock, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 147.

[6] By contrast, western depictions of these saints offer a much greater deal of variety. For a survey of these depictions in the later Middle Ages, see Andrea-Bianka Znorovzky, “Between Mary and Christ: Depicting Cross-Dressed Saints in the Middle Ages (c. 1200-1600),” unpublished PhD thesis, Central European University (2016). See also Andrea-Bianka Znorovzky, “Marinus Unveiled: A Transvestite Saint in Western Art and Literature,” unpublished MA thesis, Central European University (2011); Andrea-Bianka Znorovzky, “Holy Female Monks-Patterns of Purity: A Comparative Approach of the Visual Representations of Saint Marina the Monk, Saint Eugenia of Rome, and Saint Euphrosyne,” Il Genere Nella Ricerca Storica, vol. 1, eds. S. Chemotti and C. La Rocca (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2015), 151-170; Kirk Ambrose, “Two Cases of Female Cross-Undressing in Medieval Art and Literature,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 23:3 (2004): 7-14.

[7] Life of Mary of Egypt, 10, trans. Maria Kouli, “The Life of St. Mary of Egypt,” Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996), 65-93, at 76.

[8] Life of Mary of Egypt, 12, trans. Kouli, “The Life of St. Mary of Egypt,” 77.

[9] On mastectomies, see Aetius of Amida, Tetrabiblos 16.103, 16.43, trans. James V. Ricci, Aetios of Amida: The Gynaecology and Obstetrics of the VIth Cenutry, A.D. (Philadelphia: Blakiston Company, 1950), 107, 49.

[10] Life of Smaragdos (or Life of Esmeraldus), trans. Agnes Smith Lewis, “Euphrosyne,” Select Narratives of Holy Women: From the Syro-Antiochene or Sinai Palimpsest (London: C. J. Clay, 1900), 46-59.

[11] Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 26, 50.1-5, trans. R. M. Price and John Binns, Lives of the Monks of Palestine (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 21, 46. See also Anonymous, Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Eudemon 1, trans. Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1975), 64.

Captions for Figures

1 Mary of Egypt. Church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou, Cyprus. (photo: The Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks fieldwork records and papers, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.)

2 John the Baptist and Virgin Mary. Church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou, Cyprus. (photo: The Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks fieldwork records and papers, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.)

3 Mary of Egypt and Zosimas. London, British Library, Theodore Psalter (Add. Ms. 19352), fol. 68r. (photo: © The British Library Board. Add. Ms. 19352 is reproduced by permission of the British Library Board, with all rights reserved)

4 Reconstruction of Paul of Aegina’s surgical treatment for moderate and severe gynecomastia with pre-operative and post-operative lunate incisions. (Drawings after Marios Papadakis, Andreas G. Manios, Eelco de Bree, Constantinos C. Trompoukis, and Dimitris Tsiftsis, “Gynaecomastia and Scrotal Rhacosis: Two Aesthetic Surgical Operations for Men in Byzantine Times,” Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive, & Aesthetic Surgery 63:8 (2010): 600-604, at 601-602)

6 Modern lunellum. Round Knife for leather working by C.S. Osborne and Company.

7 Western medieval depiction of monk using a lunellum to scrape parchment for manuscript production. Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Msc. Patr. 5, fol. 1v.

8 Martyrdom of Melasippos, Karina, and their Son. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ‘Menologion’ of Basil II (Vat. gr. 1613), p. 165. © 2019 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, all rights reserved.