"She Who is Not" Living In the "Footsteps of Christ"

Trans*, Fluid or Gender Nonconforming Identities of Female Italian Saints in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

This research paper explores the potentially gender nonconforming or queer identities of two notorious female saints from medieval Italy: Clare of Assisi (1194-1253) and Catherine of Siena (1347-1380). While they are often portrayed as epitomizing female sanctity, I argue that their lives and writings actually reveal a want to transcend their assigned sex at birth–in this case, being assigned female-at-birth, or AFAB–and, by extension, their perceived gender identities as women.. I explore how both saints navigated and subverted gendered expectations through their religious expression and, by extension, how Christianity itself could open up such possibilities for non-conforming or trans* individuals in the medieval period. With that, I pay close attention to the influences of Christian theology, particularly the idea of "imitatio Christi" and androgyny in God and humanity in the Bible itself, showing a sort of "third gender," or nonconforming state that Christians could achieve through their belief, seeing this kind of expression being possible. Through all this, I find that Christianity, even when the Church and Church writers upheld strict gender lines–especially towards women–still provided a space for individuals like Clare and Catherine to be able to express their own gender nonconformity or queerness through religious means. Through the use of secondary scholarship and closely analyzing Clare and Catherine's hagiographies, or vitae, and their own surviving writings, these themes of identity and gender non-conformity are not only just present, but are essential to their stories, making trans* or generally queer identities all the more important a subject of historical analysis.