Generation and Degeneration

Abstract

This book is about the discourses that inform constructions of genealogies, whether we speak of genealogy in the biological sense of procreation and reproduction or in the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony.It retraces generational fantasies and generational discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical.It moves through a number of centuries, from Greco-Roman times to our more recent past.It reflects on topics as varied as what makes men manly to who is Christ's father, and from what kinds of erotic practices went on among women in sixteenth-century Turkish seraglios to how men's hemorrhoids can be variously labeled.Such discourses necessarily bring to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics.For many centuries generation-and thus genealogy-has been understood as men's business.So much has been written by physicians, theologians, philosophers, anthropologists, cultural critics, and writers of literature on why men and engendering are linked, that the point hardly seems in need of elaboration here.Women do not generate, Augustine reminds us, following the scripture.They conceive. 1But can any man generate, and is marriage only for the generating kind?Unlike Roman law, the church did not take a position until a brief of Pope Sixtus V, ''Cum frequenter'' (1588), was interpreted as declaring that eunuchs, castrati, and spadones (that is, men with damaged sexual organs) were not real men because they could not offer intergenerational continuity, no matter their heterosexual affections, if any, and therefore could not legally 1. Augustine, Opus imperfectum 3.85.4.

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