Subjectivities in Transition: Gender and Sexual Identities in Cases of ‘Sex Change’ and ‘Hermaphroditism’ in Spain, C . 1500–1800

Abstract

This article assesses how critical boundaries around concepts of what made men and women were constructed in changing social, diagnostic, medical and ‘gendered’ circumstances in Spain from the early sixteenth century through to the late 1700s. In order to illustrate this process, we draw on a number of cases of ‘doubtful’ sexual identity exemplified by instances of ‘transvestism’, ‘transgenderism’ and ‘hermaphroditism’ over the period 1500 to 1800. Recent work has analysed cases of ‘doubtful’ sexual identity in Spain but has not provided a systematic overview of their implications with respect to broader European understandings of sex differences, subjectivity and agency. Furthermore, no Spanish study has traced the decline of one of the principal figures in such liminal cases, the ‘hermaphrodite’ or person that changes sex, a shift which took place during the seventeenth century in Spain and in other European countries. By 1700, it was believed in most scientific and legal circles that hermaphrodites could not procreate, that women could not in reality change into men and, as a less likely scenario, that men could not change into women; true hermaphroditism was deemed incapable of existence. This period is witness to two major debates that characterized understandings of the nature of ‘sex’, that is, the relative status of men and women. First, the very notion of what ‘sex’ was and what significance it entailed on a biological, social and legal level. It has been argued that medieval and early modern European notions of sex as an anatomical category were founded on a ‘one-sex’ model, whereby medical doctors acknowledged no fundamental physical differences between the sexes, ascribing differences between men and women to questions of bodily ‘organization’. Such a notion does not do full justice, however, to the social and legal realms inhabited by men and women and the fact that these were in fact rigidly differentiated. It has further been posited that this ‘one-sex’ anatomical model gradually declined and was replaced by the early eighteenth century by a dichotomous ‘two-sex’ model, which encapsulated anatomical, biological, legal and social differences between men and women. Many historians have argued however, that such a passage between a ‘onesex’ and ‘two-sex’ schema, despite its initial attractiveness, is not useful as it obscures the historical diversity of ideas of ‘sex’ and the very problematic periodization of any shift from a ‘one-sex’ model to a ‘two-sex’ model. The second major change of

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