Gender Mobility

What if our long-held understandings of gender have less historical basis than we imagine? In Gender Mobility, Susan E. Hylen argues that the Roman gender order was definitively non-binary. She makes a compelling case that freeborn men, freeborn women, freed men, freed women, enslaved men, and enslaved women all constituted different genders. And the possibility that some people could change gender -- what Hylen calls "gender mobility" -- was a standard feature of the period.