#  FRENCH 80BB - Beyond the Binary: Sex, Gender, and Nature in Premodern French Writing 

 





 Semester:   Spring 

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 Year offered:  2027 

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 Link: [Course Website](https://locator.tlt.harvard.edu/course/colgsas-233123/2026/spring/16245) 

 

 

 

How do early modern French texts produce, reinforce, or destabilise binaries? This course explores how, in the period around the ‘fixing’ of the French language by the *Académie française* into the regulated forms we are familiar with today, grammatical and material-social genders alike could be weird and unstable. How and why were binaries read in nature, and where did these threaten to break down? How did sexual difference and gender nonconformity register in scientific and social discourses? By tracing the histories of a series of major structuring binaries (including nature/culture, male/female, normal/monstrous), we will examine the unruly realities that these pairs would seek to organize, and the ways in which early modern textual forms themselves challenge binaries such as ‘literary’/’non-literary’.



 

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  [### Jennifer Oliver

 ](/people/jennifer-oliver) [jennifer\_oliver@fas.harvard.edu](mailto:jennifer_oliver@fas.harvard.edu)On Leave Academic Year 2025-26

Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures

 

 

 Research interests: the intersections between literary studies and the histories of science, medicine, and technology; art and architectural history; nonhuman and eco-critical theory; and metaphor theory. Teaching interests: besides pre-modern texts from... 

 

 

      ![Jenny](/sites/g/files/omnuum8296/files/styles/hwp_4_5__690x865/public/2025-04/Jennifer%20Oliver%20Cropped%20Headshot%20RLL.jpeg?itok=iycXnE89) 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ 70-100 ](/class-categories/70-100)
- [ Jennifer Oliver ](/instructor/jennifer-oliver)
- [ French ](/language/french)
- [ Spring 2027 ](/term/spring-2027)