Sex, Identity and Hermaphrodites in Iberia, 1500–1800 by Cleminson, Richard, and Francisco Vázquez García (review)

Estebanía de Valdaracete was a young girl from a noble family who from an early age — in the phrasing of contemporary accounts — distinguished herself in ‘heroic qualities and deeds’, to the astonished wonder of neighbours and fellow villagers: her physical strength, and her outstanding bravery made her stand out in physical exercise, as did her dedication and extraordinary fencing skill. After much debate, she was made to be examined by matrons and determined to be ‘hermafrodita’, that is, intersex. Estebanía underwent a ceremonial procedure of electio of sex, where she was offered to choose her sex, her gender, and her life, provided that her choice was solid for the rest of her life. She chose to live as a man (Esteban), and took an oath to do so before the bishop and several other authorities. Esteban set up a very successful fencing school in Granada. Her case was treated as a ‘marvel’ or res mirabilis, that is, an extraordinary event that showed the omnipotence of God and the inscrutability of His designs.

But precious few cases examined by Cleminson and Vázquez García involve what might have been an intersex person. Most are in fact examples of gender fluidity, which throw a lot of light into our understanding of early-modern gender as an intersectional marker of social rank, class subalternity, and personal agency. The case of Catalina de Erauso (a Spanish Orlando) is an example of such personal agency: in the over-masculine context of the Spanish Empire, Catalina succeeded in the construction of an individual gender identity by creatively adopting and combining a set of rigid normative gender patterns and roles. Born into the lower nobility, Catalina was soon famous for her rowdy, undisciplined, hyper-masculine character. She escaped a Dominican convent at the age of fifteen and lived an adventurous life as a swordsman, page, butler, cattle owner, tax manager, and soldier, enlisting in the king’s militias under a male name, and swiftly progressing to receive the rank of Lieutenant General. When her deception was uncovered, she received permission from the king and the pope to change her name and live as a soldier, and received a pension according to her military rank. Against all odds, her courtly and military manliness was an antidote for the perceived decadence of the Spanish Empire.

However, both Catalina and Estebanía came from good families. Elena/o de Céspedes did not. In 1586 in the city of Toledo (Spain), the officials of the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition placed Eleno — who was then living as a married man to a woman twenty years his junior — under arrest, under the charge of sodomy (‘that utterly confused category’, as Foucault put it). It was found out that Eleno had been born as a woman, of morisco origin (i.e. formerly Muslim, forcibly converted); she was also dark-skinned, poor, and queer. Needless to say, the officials of the Inquisition Tribunal did not show much mercy on this occasion, nor was she offered much choice.

The three examples excerpted represent a range of situations, problems, categories, and disciplines examined in detail by the authors of this book, which also provides an illuminating analysis of the different discourses employed to deal with them: philosophical, medical, ecclesiastical, legal. The primary literature discussed (from Plato to Galen, from Avicenna to Lacqueur) provides a succinct, accurate, engaging introduction to the cases examined and will offer possible avenues for future research to the attentive reader. This chronological approach to the topic greatly enriches the authors’ findings, and will prove an interesting complement to anyone familiar with Foucault’s research into the notion of the ‘abnormal’ in eighteenth-century France. Indeed, this book fills a substantial gap in the scholarship on the subject, mainly limited to Northern Europe and Britain...