Palestinian Trans Saints in Late Antiquity: Gender and Sexuality in the Lives of Pelagia the Penitent, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis from Feminist and Trans Perspectives
Palestinian Trans Saints in Late Antiquity: Gender and Sexuality in the Lives of Pelagia the Penitent, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis from Feminist and Trans Perspectives

Summary/Abstract: This paper reexamines feminist and transgender theory’s concepts of agency and resistance by analyzing three late antique Lives of gendercrossing saints from the Holy Land: Pelagia the Harlot, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis. It investigates the possibilities for agency and resistance of the fictional protagonists of these hagiographic narratives against the forms of domination and the encroachments of power in the Byzantine social and religious contexts. This study contends that, despite the constraints of their situation, the subjugated individuals were capable of exercising their agency and were not passive victims of the existing social system. Even if the gender-crossing acts themselves did not undermine the conditions of oppression, albeit discursively destabilizing the societal norms of gender and sexuality, the small-scale forms of resistance of the dominated can be recovered in these accounts, notwithstanding the fragmentary and transient character of these efforts.

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