Beyond Gender: Challenging the Cis-Hetero Binary in Ancient Medicine Call for papers
SOCIETY for CLASSICAL STUDIES
158th ANNUAL MEETING
JANUARY 7-10, 2027
BOSTON
Call for Papers for Panel Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Medicine and Pharmacology
Organized by Aileen Das (University of Michigan), Malina Buturovic (Yale University)
Over the past thirty years, Anglophone scholarship on sex-gender in ancient medicine has been profoundly shaped by foundational works including (but not limited to) Leslie Dean-Jones’ Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (1994), Helen King’s Hippocrates’ Woman (1998), and Nancy Demand’s Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece (1994), as well as a series of influential articles by Ann Hanson (1990–1994). These resources—products of third-wave feminism with its emphasis on cis women’s liberation—form the bedrock of current approaches to sex-gender in the study of medicine in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.
Since then, several important contributions–some of them in critical dialogue with Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1992)–have begun to critically interrogate the boundaries of gender/sex identity (Flemming 2000; King 2013; Holmes 2019). In more recent years, an emergent body of literature has thrown open questions of sex-gender and queerness within classics and related fields, drawing on contemporary theoretical resources. Notable contributions include The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory (Haselswerdt, Ella, et al., 2024), the Res Difficles 2024 conference on Gender and Trans Studies, as well as scholarship in adjacent disciplines: Rabbinic and Biblical Studies (Rafael Neis 2023; Max Strassfeld 2023), Byzantine Studies (Betancourt 2020), and research on Late Antiquity and beyond (LaFleur, Raskolnikov, Klosowska, eds. 2021). At the same time, these scholarly vitalities are coupled with a sense of urgency arising from the politicization of trans identities and the historic role played by medical communities in pathologizing sex-gender variation.
This panel invites papers that move beyond the essential search for “trans-cestors”—as important as that work is for contemporary sex-gender queer communities—to explore what ancient medicine as a field can contribute to the movements “to trans the past” and to disrupt the assumption of cis-hetero sex-gender identities as pre-modern normative standards. We welcome approaches on:
- How pre-modern medicine theorized, biologized, and therapized normative and non-normative sex-gender identities
- New interpretations that apply fresh theoretical perspectives to questions, problems, texts, and passages that have been traditionally understood in connection with cis-women’s health
- Pedagogical strategies for bringing trans perspectives into ancient medicine classrooms
- Reception studies considering how Greco-Roman medical authorities are invoked in modern debates about sex-gender diversity
- Perspectives expanding the geographic and chronological boundaries of ‘classical antiquity,’ including comparative work with Rabbinic and Biblical Studies, Byzantine Studies, and Late Antiquity and its Islamicate uptake
As with prior panels from the Society for Ancient Medicine, we invite submissions from a broad vision of classical antiquity, with openness to various disciplines, methods, and chronologies (from pre-modern through early modern).
Please send abstracts that follow the guidelines for individual abstracts (see the SCS Guidelines for Authors of Abstracts) by email to Professor Aileen Das at the University of Michigan (ardas@umich.edu) by March 9, 2026.
Please ensure that the abstracts are anonymous.
The organizers will review all submissions anonymously, and their decision will be communicated to the authors of abstracts by early April, with enough time that those whose abstracts are not chosen can participate in the individual abstract submission process for the upcoming SCS meeting.
Key Bibliography:
Dean-Jones, Leslie. Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science. Clarendon Press, 1994.
Demand, Nancy. Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Flemming, Rebecca. 2000. Medicine and the Making of Roman Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hanson, Ann Ellis. 1987. “The Eight Months’ Child and the Etiquette of Birth: Obsit Omen.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61: 589–602.
– 1994. A Division of Labor : Roles for Men in Greek and Roman Births. Amsterdam: Najade.
Hanson, Ann Ellis, and Iain M. Lonie. 1983. “The Hippocratic Treatises “On Generation”, “On the Nature of the Child”, “Diseases IV”. A Commentary.” The Classical World 76 (4): 249. https://doi.org/10.2307/4349462.
Holmes, Brooke. 2019. “Let Go of Laqueur: Towards New Histories of the Sexed Body.” Eugesta: Journal of Gender Studies in Antiquity (9): 40.
King, Helen. Hippocrates’ Woman. Routledge, 1998.
King, Helen. 2013. The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence. The History of Medicine in Context.
Laqueur, T.W. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press.
Sissa, Giulia. Greek Virginity. Harvard University Press, 1990.
Classics and Queer Theory
Haselswerdt, Ella, et al. The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory. 1st ed., Routledge, 2024.
Campanile, D., Carlà-Uhink, F., and Facella, M., ed. 2017. TransAntiquity: Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Surtees, A., and Dyer, J.E., ed. 2020. Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World. Intersectionality in Classical Antiquity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
“Res Difficles 2024 Conference on Gender and Trans Studies.”
Rabbinic and Biblical Studies
Neis, Rafael. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species. University of California Press, 2023.
Strassfeld, Max. Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature. University of California Press, 2023. Byzantine Studies
Betancourt, Roland. Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Late Antiquity and Beyond
LaFleur, Raskolnikov, Klosowska, eds. Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern. Cornell University Press, 2021.
