ABSTRACT
The androgyne and the hermaphrodite are two figures that, in recent years, have received considerable attention from early modern scholars.1 In studying them here, my principal object will be to examine the ways in which they intersect with the topic of (homo)sexuality. I will argue that they are particularly illuminating with regard to affective and sexual relationships between women and to the differences regulating the conception and practice of female and male homosexuality. With this aim in mind, I will refer primarily to literary texts rather than to medical or legal ones.2 I will begin by examining the adaptation and translation of the androgyne myth recounted by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium and its reuse by poets such
1 See, notably, Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites; Long, Hermaphrodites, and earlier articles, especially ‘Jacques Duval on Hermaphrodites’, in High Anxiety, ed. Long, pp. 107-38; Marian Rothstein, ‘Mutations of the Androgyne: Its Functions in Early Modern French Literature’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 34 (2003), 409-37; Jerome Schwartz, ‘Aspects of Androgyny in the Renaissance’, in Human Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1978), pp. 121-31; Jones and Stallybrass, ‘Fetishizing Gender’; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, ‘Hermaphrodites in Renaissance France’, Critical Matrix. Princeton Working Papers in Women’s Studies, 1:5 (1985), 1-19; Daston and Park, ‘The Hermaphrodite’; Park, ‘The Rediscovery’; Catharine Randall Coats, ‘A Surplus of Significance: Hermaphrodites in Early Modern France’, French Forum, 19 (1994), 17-34; John O’Brien, ‘Betwixt and Between: Hermaphroditism and Masculinity’, in Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century France, ed. Ford and White, pp. 127-46. Scholarly practice regarding the term ‘androgyne’ is to use it to refer to all three kinds of double human beings described by Aristophanes in the Symposium (189 C-193 D). As etymology clearly signals, however, it refers more accurately to the being of composite male and female sex. In the absence of a general name or an equivalent term for each of the double single-sexed beings, I will follow common usage. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the generalisation of the term ‘androgyne’ announces, and might even be seen as serving to justify, the reduction of the story to exclusively heterosexual dimensions; it appears, that is, as both a symptom and a cause of a common forgetting or erasing of the full scope of the story.
