ABSTRACT
Julia Epstein credits Ambroise Paré with having begun ‘the process of naturalizing and medicalizing gender disorders and other anomalies’ in his book, On Monsters and Marvels (1573). She also attributes to him the conceptual shift of stressing that ‘cultural ideas about gender appropriate behavior have equal importance with genitalia’ when determining, for example, whether an hermaphrodite be reclassified as male or female and cites the following criteria from Paré's text: ‘whether the whole disposition of the body is robust or effeminate; whether they are bold or fearful, and other actions like those of males or females.’ 1 Such a gendered pattern of teratological analysis does lend itself most readily to interpretations of hermaphroditism. As both I and Emma Donoghue have argued elsewhere, this kind of methodology was used within eighteenth-century paramedical treatises to try to explain away female homosexuality, for example, as a physiological anomaly: a perverse desire was thus discreetly redesigned as bodily malfunctioning. 2 Randolph Trumbach's readings of hermaphroditism in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries present both the female and the male homosexual as subjects who were, when their particular sexual practice contravened the patriarchal code, classified as hermaphrodites. 3 However, I want here to explore the ways in which the ideas of ‘gender appropriate behavior’ that we find articulated by Paré were mobilized in eighteenth-century writings against both sodomy and masturbation in texts other than those which use hermaphroditism to pathologize sexually deviant practices. Within the discursive contexts of this article the effeminacy that Paré had diagnostically employed to detect the ‘real’ sex of an hermaphroditic person becomes symptomatic of an ‘unhealthy’ mode of sexual practice. In particular, I want to emphasize the discursive frame within which this ‘unhealthy’ effeminacy encodes fears that exceed the literal boundaries of the sexual body. Paramedical condemnations of sodomy and masturbation will be seen to register an anxiety about the emasculation of the nation state by its sexually degenerate subjects.
