History of Sexuality Research Group
Conveners
- Dr Richard Cleminson
- Dr Sally Hines
- Professor Alison Oram
The next meeting will take place on Thursday 22nd April 2010 at 3pm in CIGS, University of Leeds. All welcome
"The Hermaphrodite, Fecundity and Military Efficiency: Dangerous Subjects in the Emerging Liberal Order of Nineteenth-Century Spain" (Richard Cleminson, University of Leeds).
The nineteenth century in Spain saw, from a range of political perspectives, the attempt to order society in ways that departed from those employed in the ancien regime. Political and social rights, changing gender patterns and knowledge about medicine and the body underwent fundamental developments. Part of the uneasy transformation of a traditionalist social and political order to a liberal social order was a reconfiguring of the space between the sexes, the appropriateness of certain behaviours and aspirations of men and women and the very designation of who was male and female. Particular attention emerged around those subjects who did not neatly fall into the masculine or feminine category: those deemed hermaphrodites. As part of the discussions in medical texts on hermaphroditism we see the presence of concerns such as the ordering of subjects according to existing marital law, the refusal to knowingly endorse or permit certain acts (such as sex or marriage between individuals of the same sex) and the avoidance of disruption in the ranks of the military by defining (the male) sex clearly. This talk traces the origins of these concerns and discusses how the overarching philosophy of those medical and legal texts in the nineteenth century dedicated to questions of hermaphroditism was to create efficient subjects in the context of the new liberal order and to delimit those deemed dangerous on the basis of their equivocal anatomy.