Global histories of gendered embodiment

The emergence of gendered bodies as an object of historical inquiry has differed widely across scholarly cultures. Such histories have focused on how the bodies of one or another sex or gender have been described, proscribed, incited to pleasure, regulated, pathologized, punished, persecuted, eroticized, exoticized, discursively constructed, visually represented, or imaginatively conceptualized with reference to different world regions and cultures. Such studies are found in histories of the natural sciences, sport, dance, politics, digestion, race, death, sexuality, and dress. Gendered bodies have also been researched in global and world history, via histories of health and medicine, histories of emotions, and histories of Indigenous and gender diverse people. Considering early 20th-century French nonbinary artist and photographer Claude Cahun via a case study illustrates how gendered embodiment may refer to a more specific lens of historical inquiry—one that draws upon first-person sources containing evidence of self-reflection about bodies, sex, or gender from past peoples’ own perspectives.