Patricia Skinner

The Gendered Nose and its Lack: "Medieval" Nose-Cutting and its Modern Manifestations

Time magazine’s cover photograph in August 2010 of a noseless Afghan woman beside the emotive strapline, “What happens if we leave Afghanistan,” fuelled debate about the “medieval” practices of the Taliban, whose local commander had instructed her husband to take her nose and ears. Press reports attributed the violence to the Pashtun tradition that a dishonored husband “lost his nose.” This equation of nose-cutting with tradition begs questions not only about the Orientalist lens of the western press when viewing Afghanistan, but also about the assumption that the word “medieval” can function as a label for such practices. A study of medieval nose-cutting suggests that its identification as an “eastern” practice should be challenged. Rather clearer is its connection with patriarchal values of authority and honor: the victims of such punishment have not always been women, but this is nevertheless a gendered punishment of the powerless by the powerful.

Defacing Women: The Gendering of Disfigurement

This chapter takes a gendered approach to disfigurement in terms of its disempowering function, but will then examine in detail the minority of documented cases of disfigured women. How do these reports differ from those dealing with men? It becomes clear that a woman’s face is deeply enmeshed with her sexuality, and that the punishments targeted against women’s faces appear to have been different from those meted out to men. Throughout the chapter, “gender” will be understood as a web of power relations between not only men and women, but within each group. The power to disfigure a woman signaled not so much a man’s authority over her, but his position vis-a-vis other men, for whom control over their households and family was central to their own masculinity.

Disfigurement, Authority and the Law

This chapter investigates the troubled connection between many cases of disfigurement and claims to authority expressed in medieval legal sources. Framing its discussion will be a consideration of Giorgio Agamben’s work on sovereign power: whilst early medieval law codes universally condemned interpersonal violence and poured particular opprobrium on damage inflicted to the head and face, medieval rulers reserved the right to inflict exactly the same kinds of damage as punishment for transgressions against the law, particularly in cases of repeated theft, adultery or treason. When such punishments became frequent or unjustified, however, medieval writers report them as atrocities, making clear to readers that such behaviors were unacceptable, despite the ruler’s special status as constituting, rather than being bound by, the law.

Paths to Rehabilitation? The Possibilities of Treatment

This chapter distills examples of actual disfigurement or disfiguring head injury, and examines the evidence from texts and archaeology that suggest ways in which disfigured individuals and/or their carers might survive quite serious head injuries, and/or seek solutions to their damaged appearance, whether through concealment or actual treatment. Included here will be the rare cases documenting a “rehabilitation” of sorts, whether medical or moral. Striking medical metaphors on wound care in the pastoral letters of clergy suggest that medical knowledge was not entirely absent in the early Middle Ages, simply transferred to a different conceptual arena. The role of the Church in assisting victims psychologically is considered.

The Face, Honor and “Face”

This chapter asks the question “What is a face, and how does it function in social relations?” Several recent medieval studies play on the multiple meanings of the word “face” to imply not only the physical features of a person, but a deeper sense of personhood that can be found in historical, philosophical and theological studies, as well as modern social psychology. This demands a certain care in the use of the term when utilizing it to convey loss of status in medieval culture. Associated with the idea of face, but not exactly coterminous with it, is the idea of honor. The distinction is visible in Welsh law, which is used as a case study to interrogate other sources and regions.

Stigma and Disfigurement: Putting on a Brave Face?

The flipside to honor in medieval culture was shame. This introduces the theoretical framework explored in this chapter, the idea of disfigurement as stigma. Elaborated upon in detail by Erving Goffman in the 1960s, and influential on generations of sociologists and historians since, stigma is a powerful analytical concept with which to explore medieval disfigurement. As Goffman points out, a stigmatizing condition could be visible or invisible, the product of a person’s own actions or inflicted upon her or him by the wider social group. Different categories of stigma have been proposed by subsequent studies, and these are used to investigate a range of medieval texts, illustrating the contingency of reports of disfigurement and the need to situate them within specific contexts.

Conclusion: Taking the Long View on Medieval Disfigurement

The concluding chapter brings together the themes explored in the book, and suggests that living with disfigurement was highly contingent upon both the circumstances of the disfigurement and the purpose of the author/s reporting it.

Ways of Seeing: Staring at and Representing Disfigurement

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s groundbreaking work on staring is used to frame this chapter, where Byzantine texts are used to introduce the idea of “textual staring”—accounts so detailed and emotive that they go beyond simple reporting. Far from being the person controlling the transaction, the starer is in fact disempowered by their curiosity over the unexpected appearance of the person being stared at. Iconographic sources are also explored, although the early medieval disregard for the physical body, influenced by Church doctrine, means that no portrayal of a disfigured face can be found for this period. Other forms of staring, including the use of mirrors, are then considered.

Introduction: Writing and Reading About Medieval Disfigurement

Combining the insights of historians of disability, forensic archaeologists, scholars of literary and visual culture and the histories of premodern medical practice with a renewed interrogation of early medieval primary sources, the aims of this book are to document how acquired disfigurement is recorded across different geographical and chronological contexts; to examine how the genre of text affects the record of injury and responses to it; to determine the specific medical and health implications that such punishments had for the individual and her/his community; to compare the practical knowledge available in different locations across time to deal with the aftercare of such injury, and ask whether it was applied.

'Better off dead than disfigured'? The challenges of facial injury in the premodern past

This paper argues that facial disfigurement has been neglected in the historiography of medieval Europe, and suggests some reasons for this oversight before examining the evidence from legal and narrative texts. One reason for this may be the lack of first-person accounts of being disfigured, preventing historians from accessing the experience of being disfigured. By situating the medieval examples within a wider frame of modern responses to disfigurement, it becomes apparent that whilst medical advances have assisted in restoring the damaged face, social responses to facial difference remain largely negative. When architect Louis Kahn, responsible for some of the most iconic buildings of the mid-twentieth century, especially in the Indian subcontinent, was badly burnt on his face and hands as a child, his father expressed the sentiment that he was ‘better off dead than disfigured’. Kahn’s mother, fortunately for him, took a different view, arguing that Kahn would ‘live and become a great man some day’. As recounted by Kahn’s daughter, this almost hagiographical episode epitomises triumph over adversity, and this early experience is even credited with shaping Kahn’s later practice as an architect. Ravi Kalia attributes Kahn’s later sensitivity to the play of light and shadow in his monumental public buildings to the fact that he would wear a soft hat pulled low to disguise and shade his scarred face from the sun. Both his father’s reaction and Louis’s own attempt at disguise, though, express the strength of feeling that seeing a disfigured face could elicit. The subject of this paper touches upon some sensitive issues of perceived and actual facial difference. Many of the examples I will be discussing, medieval and modern, are of catastrophic, acquired 1 Quotation from Alexandra Tyng, Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn’s Philosophy of Architecture (Chichester, 1984), 3; Ravi Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (Columbia, SC, 2004), 77.