Eunuchs and Castrati: Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe

Description

Eunuchs and Castratiexamines the enduring fascination among historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars around the figure of the castrate. Specifically, the book asks what influence such fascination had on the development and delineation of modern ideas around sexuality and physical impairment. Ranging from Greco-Roman times to the twenty-first century, Katherine Crawford brings together travel accounts, diplomatic records, and fictional sources, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate how early modern interlocutors reacted to and depicted castrates. She reveals how medicine and law operated to maintain the privileges of bodily integrity and created and extended prejudice against those without it. In consequence, castrates were constructed as gender deviant, disabled social subjects and demarcated as inferior. Early modern cultural loci then reinforced these perceptions, encouraging an othering of castrates in public contexts. These extensive, almost obsessive accounts of appearance, social propensities, and gender characteristics of castrated men reveal the historical lineages of sexual stigma and hostility towards gender non-normative and physically impaired persons. For Crawford, they are the roots of sexual and physical prejudices that remain embedded in the western experience today. Cover......Page 1 Half Title......Page 2 Title Page......Page 4 Copyright Page......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Table of Contents......Page 8 List of figures......Page 9 Acknowledgments......Page 11 List of abbreviations......Page 13 Introduction: Castrates, crossings, and pejorative sexual scripting......Page 14 1. Male castration and/as disability......Page 17 2. Transsexuality......Page 22 3. Sexual impairment and the making of modern sexuality......Page 23 Notes......Page 26 PART 1: Inceptions......Page 28 1. Making defective men: Physiology, medicine, and the therapeutics of castration......Page 30 1. Medical transformations; gender effects......Page 33 2. Castration therapeutics......Page 44 3. Toward a medical genealogy......Page 49 Notes......Page 50 2. The castration conundrum: Civil law creates sexual disability......Page 53 1. Roman rights and wrongs......Page 54 2. Exemplary unmanning......Page 62 3. Evasion and exclusion......Page 70 4. Castrates and legal animosity......Page 77 Notes......Page 78 3. Marrying castrates, or: how to make a disabled social subject......Page 83 1. The dialectics of the religious castrate......Page 85 2. The canonists on castration......Page 91 The triumph of “true semen”......Page 98 4. Marriage, scandal, and disability......Page 102 5. Instantiating disability......Page 109 Notes......Page 110 PART 2: Negotiations......Page 114 4. Playing the eunuch......Page 116 1. Someone wanting something, singing something......Page 119 2. Menacing eunuchs......Page 125 3. Castrates, couples, and cons......Page 132 4. Conclusion, or conflating castrates......Page 137 Notes......Page 139 5. The spectacular crossings of castrati......Page 143 1. Foundations......Page 146 2. Rising discord......Page 155 3. Cacophonous controversy......Page 161 4. Muffling the (semi-)men......Page 170 Notes......Page 172 6. Exotic others: Racial mappings on the castrate body......Page 175 1. Defamiliarity breeds contempt......Page 177 2. Access and (the anxieties of) race......Page 189 3. Eliding complicities......Page 197 Notes......Page 200 Conclusion: A history of interlocking vilifications......Page 204 Notes......Page 209 References......Page 210 Index......Page 245