A brief reminder that proposals for “Beyond the Binaries: Critical Approaches to Sex and Gender in Early America,” a special issue of Early American Studies, are coming due on January 31, 2013.

In a 1993 article in Sciences, biologist and historian Anne Fausto-Sterling
provocatively argued that human sex could not be neatly divided into two
simple categories, men and women. Instead, she recommended a five-part
system of categorization, including men, women, merms, ferms, and herms. At
the time of publication, Fausto-Sterling’s tongue-in-cheek proposal
provoked more criticism than applause, but in the past two decades scholars
in a wide range of disciplines, from neuroscience to gender studies, have
added evidence to her assertion that binary sex categories are not a
biological rule. With a few exceptions, however, historians of early
America have been slow to question the binary of man and woman. In the
uproar provoked by her proposal, few recall that Fausto-Sterling began her
article not with a headline grabbed from the daily papers, but with an
historical example dating to 1840s Connecticut.

Now, recent work by historians including Elizabeth Reis, Clare Sears, and
Peter Boag, indicates a growing attention to the instability of sex in
early America. Their studies illuminate the existence and social knowledge
of individuals whose bodies, gender identities, and desires defied neat
divisions. Moreover, these works provoke questions about the coherence of
the binary sex categories that historians assume as foundational. What did
it mean to be a woman or a man in early America, if, as Reis points out, in
1764 a thirty-two year old woman named Deborah Lewis could change sex,
becoming a man named Francis Lewis, and live for another six decades as an
accepted patriarch within his community? How fixed were sex identities in
early America? What possibilities existed for the expression of gender
identities that stood at variance with embodied sex? What social practices
created opportunities for the blending and rearrangement of sex identities?
How did hierarchies of race and class destabilize or re-stabilize sex
binaries? Should “men” and “women” be understood as variable rather than
unitary categories?

To encourage these questions, and others like them, Early American Studies
invites proposals for essay submissions on the theme of “Beyond the
Binaries: Critical Approaches to Sex and Gender in Early America” for a
special issue to be published in fall 2014. Early American Studies is an
interdisciplinary journal that welcomes contributions from the fields of
history, art history, literary studies, religious studies, music,
philosophy, and material culture studies among others. Possible topics
might include (but are not limited to) bodies in doubt, female masculinity,
racialized constructions of sex, religious gender crossing, and
transgenderism in North America before 1860.

Proposals of 300 words are due by January 31, 2013, and should be emailed
to rcleves@uvic.ca Authors whose proposals are
accepted will submit completed drafts of their essays by July 15, 2013.