Gender and the Body

Oxford Handbook of Medieval Women and Gender, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2013

Every interaction with the human body is mediated by culture, and here we see the value of approaching the history of medicine and health from the perspective of gender. We also see the value of approaching the history of gender through the history of health and health-seeking behaviors since it inevitably touched on all other aspects of medieval life. This essay looks first at several medical and surgical interventions on and into female bodies having to do with pregnancy and childbirth, and examines changing expectations of the gender and specialized knowledge of those who interacted with them. The essay then looks more speculatively at how questions of intercultural interaction might be used to explore the ways in which maleness was constructed or preserved by medical practitioners, including the question of whether the intersexed were seen as needing medical intervention. The field of history of health is still rapidly expanding, and the perspectives of gender analysis are a major part of what is driving that expansion forward. Keywords: medicine; healthcare; literacy; midwifery; gynecology; obstetrics; fertility; childbirth; law; inheritance; Caesarean section; surgery; hermaphrodites; eunuchs; diseases of the breasts; cosmetics; Christian religion; Islamic world; Jewish communities http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199582174.do#.Ul7iHyTFZ0s

2010

This essay examines the ways in which the physical body served to both carry and mark differences that played out in the social and political realms. The “unmarked” body seems the norm, unlimited in its potentiality; the body marked by “difference”—sex, age, debility—is limited in its potentiality. I argue here that the bodily difference most important to medieval society was sex. The physiology of the female body was decidedly different from that of the male body, and in some respects even more defining of “difference” than were the anatomical features that distinguished male from female. I take issue with the thesis of Thomas Laqueur that medieval Europe was characterized by a “one-sex body” notion, the idea that male and female were on a single (and potentially reversible) continuum. As noted, the physiological differences between male and female were understood to be profound, and they guided all basic concepts of medical thinking about basic gynecological disease. Rather, following suggestions by Katharine Park, I point out that adoption of the Galenic homological discourse by surgeons in particular (not physicians generally) was a way to make up for their relative lack of information on female pelvic anatomy. As surgeons began more and more to move into gynecological, and then obstetrical care, they analogized from male genital anatomy (which they knew well from many decades of increasingly sophisticated work on male hernias and other genital surgeries) to female anatomy. “To deliver on such claims [to have gynecological and obstetrical expertise], they had to act as if they knew what they were doing.” I also survey traditions of depicting the female body in medical contexts. I also discuss so-called “male menstruation” (which in some cases was seen a salubrious hemorrhoidal bleeding) and hermaphroditism. On the latter topic, I suggest that contrast between Islamic views and Christian ones is fruitful. So, too, is consideration of uterine anatomy, which was founded on the idea that the human uterus is multi-celled, with the central one believed capable of producing hermaphrodites. I then turn to paleopathology for assistance in assessing the ways in which physical debility—most importantly the classic disabling disease, leprosy—also “marked” individuals. Surprisingly, physical disability seems not to have been the most common means of distinguishing people. Still, in extreme situations, such distinction was done, a fact we see most striking in excavations from leprosaria, where the evidence suggests that those more severely (and visibly) affected by the disease were also those most like to be segregated. After a quick glance at physiognomy, the actual science of essential discernment based on physical characteristics, and chiromancy, which focused on the hands, I turn to the “markings” allowed by dress, which could more readily be taken on or cast aside at will.

Gender & History, 2023

This article focuses on four individuals from France and Italy who were viewed as hermaphrodites and their attempts to become members of the Catholic clergy between c.1650 and 1720. Drawing on largely unexplored material from the archive of the Roman Congregation of the Council, this article argues that whether, and how, bodies were problematised as hermaphroditic depended on the different and changing thresholds of masculinity and femininity they were confronted with. Offering a fresh perspective on practices of constructing sex and sex difference, this article suggests that the decades c.1700 saw marked transformations in the defining and assigning of sex both in theory and social practice. Medical and ecclesiastical decision-makers shifted their attention from a broader spectrum of behavioural and bodily signs to the anatomy of genitalia. The trend towards heightened vigilance and intransigence towards perceived sexual ambiguity was, however, highly asymmetrical, targeting mainly individuals initially believed to be women. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Performing Medieval Sexuality e notion of gender as performance has enabled scholars to examine the constant and consequential work that people put into constructing their sexual identities. Rather than treating the roles of women and men as biologically determined absolutes, gender theorists stress the social forces involved in establishing and maintaining gender norms. Two recent additions to this ongoing discussion approach the performance of gender in the Middle Ages at different levels of detail. While the articles collected in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives address large-scale questions of how gender and religion intersected in medieval Europe, those in Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook scrutinize specific medieval treatments of gender-in-performance, in public as well as in the bedroom. In so doing, both collections challenge Michel Foucault's contention that sexual identity is a distinctly modern concept.

Medieval Feminist Forum

2005

~ his collection of 11 essays focuses, as the title suggests, on the interplay of sexuality and spirituality in medieval literature and culture. With the exception of Alexandra Barratt's '''The Woman Who Shares the King's Bed': The Innocent Eroticism of Gertrud the Great of Helfta," the essays deal with English texts, and with the exception of David Salomon's "Corpus Mysticum: Text as Body / Body as Text," which deals with sixteenthcentury recusant writings, the essays treat texts dating from the 13'" through the 15'" centuries.

Medieval Feminist Forum, 2007

2019

In his book From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, Kyle Harper emphasizes that Christianity had made an enormous difference in how late ancient men and women conceptualized their passions and sexual activities. Also, feminist critics of ancient philosophical theories have focused on theories of matter. Fascinated by Aristotle’s identification of matter with privation, ugliness and femininity, they often tend to consider mainstream philosophies as sexist and the positive evaluation of matter and body as the gauge of the liberation of the female gender. Moreover, there is a tendency to link the Christian dichotomy of spirit and flesh to these philosophical theories. On the other hand, Late Antique scholars, following the lead of Peter Brown, have pointed to the function of sexual renunciation in early Christianity in liberating women from their traditional roles played in the Roman society. Yet, rarely if ever do scholars who are engaged in gender and sexuality studies attempt to conduct a comprehensive and in-depth study into these interrelated phenomena, while mainstream scholarship on these often turns a blind eye to the gendered perspective.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1991

Eugesta: Journal on Gender Studies in Antiquity, 2019

Once upon a time, the body had no sex. This is the story that has long been told about the history of the sexed body in “the West” under the influence of Thomas Laqueur’s book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, published in 1990. It has continued to be told across disciplines, despite incisive critiques of Laqueur’s use of evidence and historical analysis, most recently in Helen King’s The One-Sex Body on Trial (2013). We need to let go of this story once and for all. This article again marshals the historical evidence against Laqueur’s story alongside a critique of that story’s historiographical tropes, a critique indebted to two decades of work in queer theory and the history of sexuality on logics of alterity and affinity in narratives about the premodern past. Laqueur’s account, it is argued, relies on the mutually reinforcing support of two binaries: sex vs. gender and modern vs. premodern. By interrogating each of these binaries, the article proposes new directions in the history of the sexed body within the many traditions of knowledge and practice in dialogue with learned Greek medical texts. It is first shown that, freed from a later twentieth-century opposition of sex and gender, the evidence from the ancient Greek medical and philosophical tradition yields views of the sexed body that often bring together a commitment to sexual difference as physically embodied with a commitment to therapeutic and normative techniques of gender designed to correct for the waywardness of matter. These views, moreover, are many and diverse. The second half of the essay aims to disrupt the monolithic categories of “premodern” and “modern” by emphasizing the diasporic and non-linear nature of the reception of Greek medical texts and the complications of what Ahmed Ragab evocatively calls the “sexscape” that they produce; the importance of situating accounts of “the Greeks” within the dynamics of various historical moments, especially in the early modern period, so pivotal for Laqueur’s story; and the persistent influence of a Foucault-influenced nar- rative of the premodern past’s radical alterity on the history of the sexed body. The article argues for reading the complexity of the premodern past together with the complexity of our relation to that past.