Reimagining Gender

Abstract

Genealogies of gender's emergence as a modern analytic category typically proceed with an account of John Money and Robert Stoller's mid-twentieth-century research with intersex patients and an acknowledgment of the category's ongoing entanglement with racist, colonial, and eugenic logics. The loathsome historical connections between gender categories and sexology have prompted scholars to argue that these terms need to be rethought, unmotivated, or even relinquished. However, rather than abandoning these tools of categorization, popular queer and trans culture has recently been depicted as undergoing a “taxonomical renaissance.” This article makes sense of this discrepancy by foregrounding the ongoing influence of the medieval recombinative imagination and esoteric spiritual practices in queer and trans world making. It concludes that interpreting the current proliferation of identity categories through the lens of taxonomy risks misrecognizing the polymorphous underpinnings of queer and trans cultural production.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗