Francisco Vázquez García

Subjectivities in transition: Gender and sexual identities in cases of 'sex-change'and 'hermaphroditism'in Spain, C. 1500–1800

This article assesses how critical boundaries around concepts of what made men and women were constructed in changing social, diagnostic, medical and ‘gendered’ circumstances in Spain from the early sixteenth century through to the late 1700s. In order to illustrate this process, we draw on a number of cases of ‘doubtful’ sexual identity exemplified by instances of ‘transvestism’, ‘transgenderism’ and ‘hermaphroditism’ over the period 1500 to 1800. Recent work has analysed cases of ‘doubtful’ sexual identity in Spain but has not provided a systematic overview of their implications with respect to broader European understandings of sex differences, subjectivity and agency. Furthermore, no Spanish study has traced the decline of one of the principal figures in such liminal cases, the ‘hermaphrodite’ or person that changes sex, a shift which took place during the seventeenth century in Spain and in other European countries. By 1700, it was believed in most scientific and legal circles that hermaphrodites could not procreate, that women could not in reality change into men and, as a less likely scenario, that men could not change into women; true hermaphroditism was deemed incapable of existence. This period is witness to two major debates that characterized understandings of the nature of ‘sex’, that is, the relative status of men and women. First, the very notion of what ‘sex’ was and what significance it entailed on a biological, social and legal level. It has been argued that medieval and early modern European notions of sex as an anatomical category were founded on a ‘one-sex’ model, whereby medical doctors acknowledged no fundamental physical differences between the sexes, ascribing differences between men and women to questions of bodily ‘organization’. Such a notion does not do full justice, however, to the social and legal realms inhabited by men and women and the fact that these were in fact rigidly differentiated. It has further been posited that this ‘one-sex’ anatomical model gradually declined and was replaced by the early eighteenth century by a dichotomous ‘two-sex’ model, which encapsulated anatomical, biological, legal and social differences between men and women. Many historians have argued however, that such a passage between a ‘onesex’ and ‘two-sex’ schema, despite its initial attractiveness, is not useful as it obscures the historical diversity of ideas of ‘sex’ and the very problematic periodization of any shift from a ‘one-sex’ model to a ‘two-sex’ model. The second major change of

The Hermaphrodite, Fecundity and Military Efficiency: Dangerous Subjects in the Emerging Liberal Order of Nineteenth-Century Spain

In an 1886 medico-legal report on a ‘case of hermaphrodism’, the unnamed subject of the doctors’ examination was declared to possess a womb and internal female organs, incomplete external female organs and complete perfect male external organs. Given these characteristics, whereby the external was deemed more significant than the internal in the determination of the ‘true sex’ of the individual in question, it was agreed that the male sex predominated and the conclusion to the report read: ‘el individuo en cuestion pertenece al sexo masculino con vicios de conformacion y anomalias de desarrollo congenitos que permiten considerarlo como hermafrodita androgino (esto es, del sexo tambien masculino)’ [the individual in question belongs to the male sex and has congenital vices of conformation and developmental abnormalities which mean that he is to be considered as an androgynous hermaphrodite (that is, also of the male sex)].1 This rather complex diagnosis as an ‘androgynous hermaphrodite’ meant that the person should dress as a man and should devote himself to male labours, thus conforming to prevailing gender norms in terms of dress codes and socioeconomic behaviour. In the nineteenth-century endeavour to fix the ‘true sex’ of ambiguous persons, maleness resulted from what was held to be the possession of a predominance of male genitalia, and in this particular case was confirmed despite the presence of a vagina and womb and the need to operate on the penis to establish the ‘ordinary flow’ of the urine.

The Social Significance of Homosexual Scandals in Spain in the Late Nineteenth Century

I n t h e n o v e l E l E s c a n d a l o (The scandal) by Pedro antonio de alarcon, first published in 1875, the author reproduced in a frontispiece the definition provided by the Spanish academy to describe a scandal as “the action or word that causes another party to act inappropriately or to think inappropriately of another,” a broad definition if ever there was one. While it is unlikely that alarcon was thinking specifically about sexual misdemeanors and scandals and, less likely still, about homosexuality—a medical category barely existent in Spain in the 1870s—when he described the pre-easter carnivals of 1861 in madrid as populated by “women of ill repute disguised as men and high society bachelors dressed as women,” it is interesting to note that the academy definition went on to state that scandal “is divided usually into active and passive agents,” between those promoting or being on the receiving end of the scandal, a division of roles that would reflect a common description among those specialists in Spain who focused on the emerging category of “sexual inversion.” alarcon went on to describe the carnivalesque festivities as being populated by a wide range of diverse characters, including “hermaphrodites,” and such descriptions do suggest how scandal, “transvestism,” and notions of (sexual) agency captured the imagination in the 1870s.

La prostitution au Pays basque entre XIVe et XVIIe siècles

Résumé Depuis le bas Moyen Âge, la plupart des villes en Espagne sont dotées dun bordel (mancebia). Toutefois, il semble que le Pays basque échappe à cette règle. Cet article cherche donc à établir et expliquer la particularité de cette région pour ce qui est de la politique à légard de la prostitution : on soulignera en particulier la prééminence des conventions informelles comme forme de contrôle des conduites sexuelles. On sest aussi demandé si cette singularité basque pouvait être étendue à la Navarre et à lensemble de la corniche cantabrique.