CMEMS - Race in the Archives: "The Racialization of Gender in Byzantine Texts"

The Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies presents the annual Primary Source Symposium as a weekly lecture series. This year, the theme is Race in the Archives. See the CMEMS website for the latest details about upcoming lectures in the Primary Source Symposium series and the CMEMS Workshop series. Email bazzif [at] stanford.edu (bazzif[at]stanford[dot]edu) for the Zoom link.

The first in the series is "The Racialization of Gender in Byzantine Texts" with Roland Betancourt.

In Byzantine texts narrating the lives of certain male monks, who had been assigned female at birth, there is often mention that at the end of their stories that they had not only taken on a series of masculine physical characteristics, but also that their skin had darkened and that they appeared as an "Ethiopian." This language emerges from a broader association of dark skin with masculinity seen across a host of Byzantine texts. This paper explores how processes of racialization are interlaced with notions of gender in these sources.