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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.4 (2002) 843-844



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Gary Taylor. Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood. New York: Routledge, 2000. x + 307 pp. $U.S. 25.00; $Can. 38.00 (0-415-92785-4).

The construction of masculinity being so high on the research agendas of all kinds of scholars, it is scarcely surprising that a literary critic (not just any critic, but the editor of The Oxford Shakespeare) should write a book on castration. Be warned, however: this is not a conventional historical monograph but, rather, a personal rhapsody peppered with historical and literary references. "In order to answer the question 'What does it mean to be a man?' I am asking 'What does it mean to be castrated?'" explains Taylor; "by helping us to identify what a man is not, the eunuch clarifies what a man is" (p. 13).

And what is the answer? As far as I can discern from Taylor's effusive but rather opaque pages, man in premodern times was a scrotum: an organism whose highest purpose was reproduction. In more recent times, however, man is a penis: a consumer of sexual pleasure who cannot be bothered to reproduce. The eunuch, then, is the man of the future—or perhaps, even the present—in spite of Freud's misconceived but enormously influential portrayal of castration as the ultimate loss of power. Freud, Taylor explains, did not understand that castration, historically, had nothing to do with the penis or sexual potency but was only a way to prevent reproduction; the eunuch retained full access to sexual pleasure and worldly power. (The impact of this argument is somewhat reduced, however, by Taylor's own demonstration that the sexuality of the eunuch was supposed to be the passive sensuousness of the catamite!)

Although the removal of testicles is the most concrete of biological procedures and has played an enormous role in medical and physiological research—early endocrinology, for instance, was almost entirely a science of castration—this book has nothing to say on those topics. The nearest Taylor gets to medicine is Freud and Aristotle, "the Greek zoological philosopher" (p. 33). Taylor, however, is no biology-hater: like most trendy people, he bends over backward to pay homage to sociobiological explanations of polygamy and to use hip new concepts like the "meme." It is the history of biology or medicine for which he has no time. [End Page 843] He would much rather expatiate on Christina Aguilera (a singer of some kind, I believe), his own vasectomy (which, he assures us repeatedly, has not interfered with his sexual potency), and the convolutions of A Game at Chess, an unjustly forgotten play by the English Renaissance dramatist Thomas Middleton featuring a castrated pawn.

The eunuch, Taylor rhapsodizes, "blurs all binary sexual categories" (p. 154) and lies between human and animal, between male and female. This liminality, Taylor implies, holds the key to salvation for postmodern Homo sapiens: "What would Jesus have you do? Die childless. Castrate yourself" (p. 203). The women he meets at swanky parties in New York have no problem with eunuchs, Taylor confides. Just like men, they, too, simply want pleasure, not babies. Now, the evolutionary psychologists for whom Taylor has so much respect would not, of course, accept this contention; nor, indeed, would anybody with any knowledge of the world beyond trendy New York parties. Our author, however, is a zealot—logic, reason, and even everyday reality are less important to him than his program. Those who share his contempt for philoprogenitiveness and can stomach page after page of trendily incoherent prose may well enjoy this book. Scholars looking for a historical study of castration, however, will have to look elsewhere.

 



Chandak Sengoopta
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine University of Manchester

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