Gender reversals and gender cultures : an introduction / Sabrina Petra Ramet -- Traversing gender : cultural context and gender practices / Anne Bolin -- Sumer : gender, gender roles, gender role reversals / Judith Ochshorn -- Cross-dressing and cross-purposes : gender possibilities in the Acts of Thecla / J.L. Welch -- Martyrs, ascetics, and gnostics : gender-crossing in early Christianity / Karen Jo Torjesen -- Cross-dressing, gender errors, and sexual taboos in Renaissance literature / Winfried Schleiner -- Elena Alias Eleno : genders, sexualities, and "race" in the mirror of natural history in sixteenth-century Spain / Israel Burshatin -- Becoming male : salvation through gender modification in Hinduism and Buddhism / Cynthia Ann Humes -- Gender, power, and spectacle in late-imperial Chinese theater / Sophie Volpp -- Eroticism, sexuality, and gender reversal in Hungarian culture / Lásló Kürti -- Sacred genders in Siberia : shamans, bear festivals, and androgyny / Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer -- There is more than just women and men : gender variance in North American Indian cultures / Sabine Lang -- The procreative and ritual constitution of female, male and other androgynous beings in the cultural imagination of the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea / Fitz John Porter Poole.