ABSTRACT

Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures is a collection of specially commissioned essays taking a cross cultural and cross historical perspective on the subject. The book documents the universality of gender reversals, with chapters ranging from early Christianity up to the present. It examines how gender reversals are bound up with taboo, and how this underlies various religious and ritual activities. Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures also shows how attitudes to gender-reversal can reveal much about a particular culture. Anne Bolin, Elon College, Judith Ochshorn, University of South Florida, Karen Torjesen, Claremont Graduate School, California, Julia Welch, Winfried Schleiner, Unive

chapter |30 pages

Traversing Gender

Cultural context and gender practices

chapter |14 pages

Sumer

Gender, gender roles, gender role reversals

chapter |13 pages

Cross-Dressing and Cross-Purposes

Gender possibilities in the Acts of Thecla

chapter |13 pages

Martyrs, Ascetics, and Gnostics

Gender-crossing in early Christianity

chapter |18 pages

Elena Alias Eleno

Genders, sexualities, and “race” in the mirror of natural history in sixteenth-century Spain

chapter |15 pages

Becoming Male

Salvation through gender modification in Hinduism and Buddhism

chapter |19 pages

Sacred Genders in Siberia

Shamans, bear festivals, and androgyny

chapter |14 pages

There is More than Just Women and Men

Gender variance in North American Indian cultures

chapter |22 pages

The Procreative and Ritual Constitution of Female, Male, and Other

Androgynous beings in the cultural imagination of the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea