Richard Cleminson

The Significance of the ‘Fairy’ for the Cultural Archaeology of Same-Sex Male Desire in Spain, 1850-1930

This article takes one representation of male homo-sexuality in Spain - the ‘fairy’ (or marica as he was often termed at the time)1 - in order to assess its importance with respect to framing other expressions of homosexuality and masculinity in general in the years 1850-1930. The argument here, following the work of George Chauncey with respect to New York gay sub-cultures, is that the effeminate form of homosexuality, as discursive representation and actual lived experience, can be viewed by the historian as a kind of benchmark by which many other forms of homosexuality were considered in the major Spanish cities by the 1920s.

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

“LA MALA VIDA”: SOURCE AND FOCUS OF DEGENERATION, DEGENERACY AND DECLINE

This special issue, which arises from the 2008 symposium ‘‘La mala vida in the Hispanic World’’, brings together a number of contributions that examine the issues of social deviancy and marginality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when fears about social abnormality became rife in the Hispanic world. As in other countries, such as Britain, Italy and France, deviancy, poverty and crime were thought to be present especially in the ‘‘lower orders’’, among certain racial types and in proletarian milieus and were identified by a number of emerging scientific paradigms such as criminology, psychiatry and the sexual sciences. Often these practices were subsumed under the label ‘‘la mala vida’’. They were pinpointed in the first instance by a number of Italian works such as that of Alfredo Niceforo and Scipio Sighele, La mala vita a Roma (1898), followed by their Spanish and Latin American counterparts, including Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós and José Marı́a Llanas Aguilaniedo, La mala vida en Madrid (1901). In addition to being united by their subject matter, texts such as these represented an especially modern take on the ills of society, incorporating the latest scientific interpretations of deviancy. They also reflected particular national interpretations of decline. As Daniel Pick has pointed out, the ‘‘language of degeneration’’ possessed multiple accents according to locality (Pick 10). In France, it reflected concerns over a pathological repetition of revolution; in Italy, it reflected issues arising from post-unification and in England the rise of the city and of mass society threatened conservative visions. In Spain, the thoughts of commentators who advocated the ‘‘regeneration’’ of the nation by means of far-reaching changes envisaged by regeneracionismo cannot be disaggregated from concepts of degeneration (Girón Sierra 295). Beyond reflecting national and even local languages of degeneration, discourse on la mala vida was transnational; many authors translated others’ texts or contributed to them in some way. The discourse on this subject was evidently cross-European and the ‘‘mala vida’’ texts display scientific and cultural commonalities across national boundaries. Bernaldo de Quirós translated Niceforo’s La transformación del delito en la sociedad moderna (1902), and Rafael Salillas, the criminologist to whom the authors of La mala vida en Madrid dedicated their book, wrote the prologue of the Spanish edition of the work by Niceforo. The book by Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo was translated into German as Verbrechertum und Prostitution in Madrid (Criminality and Prostitution in Madrid, 1910), showing a further international dimension. In addition, Llanas translated La mala vita a Roma for the publisher B. Serra in 1901; Bernaldo de Quirós began a South American tour in 1907 and resided for some time in Buenos Aires ‘‘donde dejó muestras de su colaboración intelectual’’ in the form of Eusebio Gómez, La mala vida en Buenos Aires (1908). The ‘‘mala vida’’ became an international phenomenon with shared interpretive paradigms and perceived social threats. An Richard Cleminson & Teresa Fuentes Peris

The Review Sexualidad (1925-28), Social Hygiene and the Pathologisation of Male Homosexuality in Spain

A los alcaldes, particularmente al de Madrid, interesa esta labor. El pueblo madrileño espera con ansiedad la exterminación epidémica para disfrutar tan sólo, a este respecto, de absoluta tranquilidad, a la vez que perpetuar su moralidad, gritando a todo pulmón que los homosexuales estorban a su moralidad y a su hidalgu ṍ a, pidiendo se extinga rápidamente el homosexualismo. (Moreno y D ṍ az-Prieto 1927: 9)

¿Mujer u hombre? Hermafroditismo, tecnologías médicas e identificación del sexo en España, 1860-1925

Este articulo es una contribucion a la reciente historiografica medica que trata de indagar en el caracter historico de la idea de «sexo». A traves de la literatura medica publicada en Espana, entre 1860 y 1925, analizamos las claves del conocimiento medico sobre la cuestion de la determinacion del sexo en los seres humanos centrandonos en el terreno fronterizo que supone el llamado «hermafroditismo». Asi mismo se analizan las tecnologias de identificacion desplegadas durante la epoca para la determinacion medico-legal de la identidad de sexo y la complejidad de elementos implicados en el sostenimiento de la dicotomia biologica hombre/mujer.

Making sense of the body: anarchism, nudism and subjective experience

In contrast to the emphasis placed in some studies on language and text as the principal lens through which to understand the body, recent accounts have argued that it is necessary to see the body not just as an entity formed and acted upon by discourse alone, but as something which is ‘made’ by a conjunction, or an interaction of discursive and material influences. Rather than leaving the physical body out of the equation, some theorists such as Bryan Turner have called for a ‘foundationalist approach’ to studies of the body. Such an approach would enable us ‘to understand how culture and social practices elaborate and construct the human body through endless social relations based on reciprocity’.1 Along similar lines, Ian Burkitt has argued for a relational approach that assesses how bodies are ‘made’ in discursive and physical contact with other bodies. These kinds of theoretical frameworks allow for a discursive and material account of the body, without essentializing the body as unchanging and without necessarily suggesting the primacy of either discourse or materiality.2 Why should an approach to the body which combines discursivity and materiality be desirable? In her critique of mainstream sociology’s emphasis on language and discourse, Hilary Rose has pointed to the very impossibility of not recognizing the materiality of the body as a functioning or malfunctioning organism. For Rose, the body as a product of language

TRANSNATIONAL DISCOURSE ON THE “MALA VIDA”: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN MADRID, BUENOS AIRES AND BARCELONA IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Authors in this special issue have focused on the varied dimensions of discourse on the ‘‘mala vida’’ including its relation to the new positivist science of criminology, its presence in literary texts, its representation of expressions of political dissidence such as anarchism, the incidence of prostitution and concerns about specific conditions such as alcoholism and moral and physical degeneration. The inhabitants of the ‘‘mala vida’’ or ‘‘underworld’’ were produced by the transition from a rural to urban society, decentralized to centralized and mainly agricultural to industrial capitalist world and they consisted of groups that had not been successfully integrated into this new order, such as beggars, gamblers, thieves, prostitutes and homosexuals. Texts on the ‘‘mala vida’’ sought explanations for the existence of these ‘‘outsiders’’, often understanding them as primitive throw-backs to a less advanced evolutionary past. While the discussion in this article focuses on the representation of one specific element of the ‘‘mala vida’’*male homosexuality in Madrid, Buenos Aires and Barcelona*it argues that the genre as a whole relied on common and interconnected frames of intelligibility such as those derived from criminology, the sexual sciences and nascent psychiatry, sets of knowledge employed in order to examine their subjects and make their claims as sources for the reform of social ills. These discursive formations became integral to a process whereby ‘‘unproductive’’ social, economic and sexual relations were identified as a cause for both moral and biological decline within a ‘‘biopolitical’’ project that sought to control and ultimately extirpate deviant strains from the modernizing nation in order to create ‘‘useful’’ subjects. As part of this biopolitical project, the disciplining of criminal subjects and the ‘‘psychiatrization of perverse pleasure’’ (Foucault 105) became two major constituent elements, even though their prophylaxis responded to different strategies. Although criminals and homosexuals, along with other ‘‘sexual deviants’’, were identified as undesirable, ‘‘mala vida’’ discourse was not consistent in its understanding of them or in its recipe for dealing with them. Should they be condemned outright or subject to a partial exoneration (or at least relatively sympathetic understanding)? This tension over the culpability or otherwise of the legally sanctioned criminal and morally or socially censured sexual deviant would characterize late nineteenthand early twentieth-century criminal anthropology, sexology and psychiatry and would inform deliberations over the strategies to be Richard Cleminson

Breasts, Hair and Hormones: The Anatomy of Gender Difference in Spain, 1880–1940

The last twenty years of work on gender in the Spanish context have seen a shift from mapping women’s experience in the labour force, female literary work and gender inequalities in the past and present to an analysis that seeks to examine how gender differences were embodied and lived out in active subjects. In tune with broader developments in feminist history, sociological and historical analysis of the body and a focus on the way in which material differences between the sexes were articulated in other countries, gender studies in Hispanism have embraced new theoretical frameworks and new subjects of examination. In addition to tracing the ways in which textual, legal and social differences on the basis of sex and gender were articulated and fortified in Spanish society, recent research has focused on how supposed biological differences were made to matter in the construction of the liberal project of equal rights, and in the construction of

Eugenics without the state: anarchism in Catalonia, 1900-1937.

Current historiography has considered eugenics to be an emanation from state structures or a movement which sought to appeal to the state in order to implement eugenic reform. This paper examines the limitations of that view and argues that it is necessary to expand our horizons to consider particularly working-class eugenics movements that were based on the dissemination of knowledge about sex and which did not aspire to positions of political power. The paper argues that anarchism, with its contradictory practice afforded by the convulsive social situation of the Civil War in Spain, allows us to assess critically the parameters of the social action of eugenics, its many alliances, and its struggle for existence in changing political circumstances not of its own making.

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.