Gender roles. Gender rules. Gender dichotomy. Gender identity. Gender spectrum. Today, issues around gender are sparking complex – and sometimes provocative – conversations in person, online and in MacEwan University's classrooms. 

“Many of our gender norms are products of a particular moment that don't translate seamlessly across centuries, cultures and classes. They are constructed and often serve the ideology of the moment,” says Dr. Kelly Summers, assistant professor of history.

In the current moment, academics and students alike are grappling with shifting perceptions, understandings and definitions tied to gender issues and in their research and their teaching. 

Here, five MacEwan faculty members look back at the interesting – and sometimes unexpected – historical perspectives they've uncovered and look forward to what the future might hold.

Pregnant monks in the Middle Ages?

The way back: Dr. Sean Hannan, who teaches a medieval history course on mysticism and gender, explains that in the Middle Ages sexual expression, gender identity, gender categories and sexual roles were not as rigid as we might think.

“People come in expecting a class that's all about knights and catapults, and I teach them about monks who talk about themselves as brides of Jesus,” says the associate professor in the Department of Humanities. “It's a much more flexible landscape and there's a lot more going on in terms of sexual expression and gender identity.”

Primary sources - writings from nuns and monks or first-hand accounts of their visions or sermons – show relationships with categories of gender that undermine current assumptions about gender and blur definitions of male and female.

Dr. Hannan paints a picture of a monk named Bernard of Clairvaux, from the Cistercian order and a key figure of the time, whose sermons to other cloistered monks contained intensely sexual language and who referred to himself as the “Bride of Christ.” 

Other monks used language implying they had been impregnated by Jesus. And while Dr. Hannan doesn’t deny that could be interpreted as one big metaphor, he’s not convinced. “It feels like it cuts deeper and actually addresses their own sense of gender identity.”

He points to all sorts of medieval examples – from Bernard of Clairvaux imagining being kissed by Jesus to Joan of Arc dressing in men’s armour – for reminders that people in the past by no means felt trapped by what he calls crude binaries.

The way forward: “Too many folks today assume that gender identities and sexual categories have been locked in from time immemorial. But that’s simply not true,” he says. “As we plot out a way forward, we should reimagine what it means for tradition to inform the way we think about gender and sexuality today.” 

Passing: Between genders, sexualities, race and class 

The way back: Dr. Joshua Toth’s research, for which he was awarded a Board of Governor’s Research Chair in 2024, focuses on “passing” – where someone passes for something society claims or assumes they’re not. 

Passing was particularly problematic in the United States, during slavery. “Mixed-race people could pass for white, frustrating the assumptions used to justify slavery,” says Dr. Toth. 

“You can find various pre-war advertisements that say something like ‘Reward: runaway slave. Has blond hair and blue eyes, but is actually black,’” explains the professor in the Department of English.  

Passing also applies in many other more contemporary contexts. 

“We're all passing. We can pass between genders, sexualities, classes and political allegiances,” says Dr. Toth. 

He brings up Jacques Lacan’s concept of “symbolic inertia” – we believe we are living our lives in a natural way that we determine, but actually we’re following a predetermined script.  

“Everyone is sort of method acting from these scripts that we are expected to follow. Most of us look in the mirror and say: ‘Oh, that's who I am.’ And some of us don’t,” he says. “Problems tend to arise when we can't deal with the fact that who we see in the mirror can change.”

The way forward: The challenge, says Dr. Toth, is when we get trapped by expectations, even our own; we feel pressure to pick a lane and stay in it. “We're constantly locking people in. And we find it frustrating when we find that the limits of someone's identity are flexible – or even unbounded.”

He says studying literature and film makes space to play with – and challenge – expectations within the classroom. 

“Even older texts and films teach us to be much more flexible in the way we think. They teach us that it's probably more important to accept people's ability to choose who they want to be, rather than who they're supposed to be, or have to be.”   

Digging into gender roles

The way back: Dr. Katie Biittner studies the anthropology of video games today, but began her career digging into how tools were used in Tanzania more than 200,000 years ago. 

Her research led her to question if variations and patterns in tool-making are based on gender alone or how labour is divided or knowledge is transmitted within communities. Did she find a connection between gender and stone tools?

“The answer is no,” says the associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, Economics and Political Science. “Everybody uses tools in different ways, and while there might be trends in terms of what tools men and women might make, they're not exclusive.” 

These days, Dr. Biittner takes her students back to a time more than a millenia ago by setting up a scenario for them to consider: a woman preparing fish. “She is not going to wait for a man to come along and create a knife for her to process that fish. That’s not practical and it doesn't make sense in terms of time, labour, knowledge and skills.”

Making historical assumptions around gender, sexuality and other aspects of identity is a dangerous game, she explains. “If we approach history from a cisgender point of view – that there are only two genders and that they align with a false understanding of two biological sexes – then we might miss important aspects of the story,” she says."Gender is not something that is static or fixed. The gender of today is not the gender of the past."

She references research about a warrior's burial site containing two bodies as an example. While one might assume they are both males or perhaps a warrior and his wife, studies challenge that cisgender assumption, revealing that some of these warrior burials contain two biological women buried together.

The way forward: De-gendering the past, says Dr. Biittner – to start from a place where we're not assuming gender. "Then to slowly, if possible, think about what evidence we have for gender and how gender was constructed for a particular group."

A language problem?

The way back: Dr. Leslie Dawson, a medical anthropologist, teaches a seminar about gender and the body. She says that any examination of gender begins with considering the constraints of the English language. 

“We use the same words, ‘male’ and ‘female,’ for a person’s sex and gender – reflecting the view that bodily sex defines gender and that your genitalia determines your gender identity,” says the assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, Economics and Political Science.

She also explains the impact of using the term ‘sex’ for both bodily sex and for the act of sex. “This is reinforcing a heteronormative view of genitalia and bodies, and promoting a pronatalist view of genitalia as reproductive anatomy and sex for reproduction.”

This is key in Dr. Dawson’s anthropology seminars, where students take part in discussions – through the lens of gender – that examine cross-cultural, contemporary and historical variations in how societies understand and experience the human body. 

“Connecting contemporary issues to theorizing, and theorizing about contemporary issues, allows students to connect the production of academic knowledge about gender and the body with real-world examples of inequity, oppression and resistance.”

The way forward: Resistance can begin with language, says Dr. Dawson. “Although there has been progress on challenging rigid sex and gender binary systems, our language still lags behind.” 

Some scholars, she explains, push against that when they use the term “gender/sex” as a single construct to challenge sex and gender binaries, and to emphasize the biosocial entwinement of sex and gender.

“Our language is still hanging on to sex and gender being the same thing. We're trying to split that apart, and it begins with pronouns.”

Historical empathy

The way back: Dr. Kelly Summers, whose research areas include the gendered dimensions of life in revolutionary France, says that when considering gender – both now and throughout history – context is everything. 

“We are all gendered beings, but how this fact is expressed varies dramatically across time and place,” says the assistant professor in the Department of Humanities.  

Take depictions of Louis XIV, she says. When he wasn’t waging war or collecting mistresses,  the most powerful man in early modern Europe favoured heels, tights and elaborate wigs. While his sense of style might be considered feminine today, Dr. Summers says he was widely admired as an archetype of manliness.

When examining the past, she encourages her students to practice “historical empathy”: to consider the situation, degree of agency and education of the people of the time in order to understand rather than simply judge them. 

“When reading the great Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century – who challenged many of the injustices of their time, while nonetheless excluding large swaths of humanity from what they considered natural or human rights – we try to place them in their context,” she says. “We try to understand their values and the historical constraints they were facing.”

Dr. Summers says that also includes considering how people’s basic rights, daily experiences and core identities might have been shaped by social expectations and laws that discriminated against whole groups of people. 

“Women and enslaved people, for example, were often kept effectively illiterate. They weren’t considered sufficiently intelligent or independent to participate in politics and were, as a result, written out of political narratives and denied basic human rights. 

That is, she explains, until novelists and memoirists begin to write from the perspective of  marginalized people, complicating the perception of who was fully human.

“The philosophers and politicians who had the power to define rights – mainly propertied white men – gradually came to realize that people who were unlike them had similarly rich interior lives and a desire to be autonomous.” 

The way forward: Dr. Summers says looking at gender history can shed light on the experiences of everyone, whatever their sex, gender identity or sexuality, and help us consider what – or who – we might be excluding in the here and now. 

“We might be sitting in our classroom in 2025, quite satisfied with ourselves, thinking that we're the triumphant end point of this narrative,” she says. “But we may well be as blindered in some ways as the 18th-century people we’re reading about.”