ABSTRACT
Abstract. In Guatem ala C ity in 1803 , the court of the Royal Protomedicato requested that the physician N arciso Esparragosa examine Juana Aguilar, called by the court a “ suspected herm aphrodite,” as part of the legal proceedings against her for double concubinage with men and women. This essay considers Esparragosa ’s report on A gu ilar’ s sexual ambiguity and his efforts to classify her. The first section analyzes the scope and purpose of the report and places Esparragosa’s anatomical and physiological assertions within the context of Enlightenment-era understandings of sexuality and sexual difference. The second section traces how Esparragosa built the argument that led him to classify A guilar and her ambiguous sexuality into a separate category of “ neither man nor w om an.” Throughout his medical report, Esparragosa appropriated the language of monstrosity to underpin his characterization of A gu ilar’s sexual and physical difference, recast in gendered and racialized terms. He used these assertions to make certain claims of categori zation that attempted to naturalize the female genitalia and to argue that female anatomical and physiological ambiguity led to sexual deviance.
