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3 iagnosing oan the hermaphrodite hypothesis At the 1992 annual meeting of the Endocrine Society, Maria I. New, a physician at the New York–Cornell Medical Center, delivered the President’s Address, entitled “Pope Joan: A Recognizable Syndrome.” In her lecture, New posed a question germane to this study: “If Pope Joan was a legend”—as New insists she “undoubtedly” was—“why as a civilization have we not lost interest in her after all these centuries?” In reply to this and a second , related question—“Why do so many people persist in thinking that her story could have been true?”—New observes: “The fact is, on a biological basis, it might have been. I have known a man who if he had lived in the Ninth [sic] century could have been Pope Joan.” The “man” in question is a patient referred to New by his wife of ten years, who noticed that her husband seemed to experience menstrual bleeding. After explaining this patient’s condition, New returns to the popess: “The endocrinological basis of the legend could be that Pope Joan had a recognizable syndrome: classical 21-hydroxylase de‹ciency,” a prenatal condition in which the lack of a particular enzyme affects the adrenal gland and, in turn, disrupts hormone levels within the fetus. “From a medical perspective,” New explains, “the story of Joan would be that Pope John VIII was a female pseudo-hermaphrodite who had a homosexual liaison, got pregnant, and delivered a child” (New and Kitzinger 5–6; New and Wilson). Here, New draws upon a classi‹catory system that Alice Domurat Dreger traces to the late nineteenth century, a period within the history of hermaphroditism that she dubs the “Age of Gonads.” Within that system the term “female pseudo-hermaphrodite” designates someone with XX chromosomes whose external genitalia appear ambiguous and who possesses ovarian tissue but lacks testicular tissue. In other words, however much such a person’s external organs might seem to defy easy classi‹cation as male or female, her or his internal organs “appear ‘typically’ feminine” (Dreger 11, 37, 140, 145–50). Physicians differentiate 85 such individuals from the far rarer cases of “true hermaphrodites,” who possess both ovarian and testicular tissue. By offering a medical perspective on the popess legend and suggesting that cases of genital ambiguity might explain its origins or staying power, New has, in a sense, attempted to diagnose Joan. In doing so, she has manifested both a physician’s professional bias and the dif‹culty of completely separating scienti‹c and cultural discourses. Although her address ranges beyond endocrinology to discuss how hermaphrodites or androgynes have ‹gured in myth, art, and popular culture, when New wishes to locate the “basis” of the Pope Joan legend, or perhaps of its longevity, she turns to biology. She thus appeals to the seemingly solid ground of anatomical sex underlying the slippery surface of culturally constructed gender. However, the peculiar way that she characterizes the circumstances surrounding Joan’s reported pregnancy reminds us to heed Judith Butler’s critique of the certainties that scienti‹c discourse concerning sex appears to offer. According to Butler, like gender, sex is a cultural construct , an “effect” produced in part by compulsory or presumptive heterosexuality . Within our culture the “heterosexulization of desire,” as she puts it, requires that each body ‹t into one of two discrete, asymmetrical categories , “male” or “female,” and that a body express its sex by acting in accord with appropriate “masculine” or “feminine” gender norms. Those who do not conform to this pattern become unintelligible; “they appear only as developmental failures or logical impossibilities” (xxix, 10–11, 23–24). The bounds of gender intelligibility appear to constrain New’s thinking, as she characterizes Joan’s “liaison” as homosexual and thus forces the hermaphroditic body that she has posited for the popess, quite resistant to classi‹cation as “male” or “female,” onto one side of the sexual dichotomy. Moreover, the physician’s allusion to sexual orientation confuses rather than clari‹es her hypothesis. By applying the adjective homosexual to Joan’s encounter with an impregnating male, New chooses to de‹ne the popess’s gender according to the masculine role that she assumed rather than according to the ovarian tissue that would have made such a pregnancy possible. To challenge the conviction that biology neutrally describes sex “as it is prior to the cultural meanings that it acquires,” Butler has observed that cultural assumptions associating maleness with presence and activity “frame and focus...

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