Abstract
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 anomalías de desarrollo congénitos que permiten considerarlo como hermafrodita andrógino (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.
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Notes
Ricardo Mariani (1886) ‘Un caso de hermafrodismo’, Revista de Medicina y Cirugía Prácticas, XVIII, 41–2, p. 41. This case was originally published in La Crónica Médica by Dr Ricardo Mariani y Albiol, medical doctor in the Serranos (Valencia) prison and was also reproduced in the prestigious El Siglo Médico in 1886. Here, the term ‘hermaphrodism’ was used. This, for a while, was more common in French and Spanish circles than in British ones. Spain followed the French tradition up to the 1920s when hermaphrodism and hermaphroditism were used interchangeably.
See Alice D. Dreger (1998) Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), p. 246, n.9. Throughout this chapter, any original orthographical errors in Spanish are retained. All translations are our own.
See, for an excellent overview of debates with special reference to Britain, the United States and France, Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex and for England Ornella Moscucci (1991) ‘Hermaphroditism and Sex Difference: The Construction of Gender in Victorian England’ in Marina Benjamin (ed.) Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, 1780–1945 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell), pp. 174–99.
For an analysis of an earlier period see Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park (1996) ‘The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France’ in Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (eds) Premodern Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 117–36.
For Spain see Francisco Vázquez García (1999) ‘La imposible fusión. Claves para una genealogía del cuerpo andrógino’ in Diego Romero de Solís, Juan Bosco Díaz-Urmeneta Muñoz and Jorge López-Lloret (eds) Variaciones sobre el cuerpo (Seville: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla), pp. 217–35;
Richard Cleminson and Rosa María Medina Doménech (2004) ‘¿Mujer u hombre? Hermafroditismo, tecnologías médicas e identificación del sexo en España, 1860–1925’, Dynamis, 24, 53–91.
See also Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García (2009) Hermaphroditism, Medical Science and Sexual Identity in Spain, 1850–1960 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).
On the idea of social danger in class and population terms see Louis Chevalier (1973 [1958]) Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
The association between homosexuality and danger in Spain is discussed in Richard Cleminson (1999) ‘Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Spain: Signposts for a Sociological Analysis’, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 22:1, 35–54. Nineteenth-century positivist criminologists such as Ferri, Garofalo and Lombroso believed that certain types were ‘predisposed’ towards dangerous conduct, be it political, social or sexual.
There is a growing body of work on the history of the prison, the law and illegality in Spain, much paying reference to Foucault’s account of France, primarily, in Foucault (1991 [1975]) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
For a number of recent discussions of these themes in Spain see Santiago Castillo and Pedro Oliver (eds) (2006) Las figuras del desorden: Heterodoxos, proscritos y marginados (Madrid: Siglo XXI/Asociación de Historia Social) and
Gutmaro Gómez Bravo (2005) Crimen y castigo: cárceles, justicia y violencia en la España del siglo XIX (Madrid: Catarata).
Michel Foucault (1980) Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books), p. viii.
See Michel Foucault (1990 [1976]) The History of Sexuality, vol. I., An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin), pp. 140–4;
Mitchell Dean (1994) Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology (London and New York: Routledge);
Mitchell Dean (1999) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage).
Michel Foucault (1980) ‘Two Lectures’ in Colin Gordon (ed.) Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester), pp. 78–108, p. 98,
discussed in Sara Mills (2003) Michel Foucault (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 82–3.
On the subject of bio-politics in Spain see Javier Ugarte (ed.) (2005) La administración de la vida. Estudios biopolíticos (Rubí: Anthropos);
Francisco Vázquez García (2009) La Invención del racismo. Nacimiento de la biopolítica en España, siglos XVI–XX (Madrid: Akal).
A large amount of material has been published on the loss of the Spanish colonies in 1898. See, for example, Joseph Harrison and Alan Hoyle (eds) (2000) Spain’s 1898 Crisis: Regenerationism, Modernism, Post-Colonialism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press).
With respect to heightened concerns over sexual inversion and homosexuality at the same time see Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García (2007) ‘Los Invisibles’: A History of Male Homosexuality in Spain, 1850–1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), chapter 5, ‘“In Search of Men”: Regeneracionismo and the Crisis of Masculinity (1898–1950)’, pp. 175–215.
Francisco Vázquez García and Andrés Moreno Mengíbar (1997) Sexo y razón: Una genealogía de la moral sexual en España (siglos XVI–XX) (Madrid: Akal), p. 203, also argue that the last quarter of the nineteenth century fostered a move towards the ‘interiority’ of the person and his/her sentiments, abilities, strengths, whereas in the ancien régime it had been a question of the alliances that an individual would make with others, his membership of guilds and the right to take the sacrament.
The term ‘“illegals” of nature’ is taken from Ricardo Campos Marín, José Martínez Pérez and Rafael Huertas García-Alejo (2000) Los ilegales de la naturaleza: medicina y degeneracionismo en la España de la Restauración, 1876–1923 (Madrid: CSIC). Doctors, educationalists and others in Spain were concerned about the presence of the ‘invert’ in convents, monasteries, barracks and schools.
On the question of the school environment, see Cleminson and Vázquez García, ‘Los Invisibles’, pp. 148–55. In France, vigilance in these places of disciplinary control was also deemed important not just for the presence of inverts but also hermaphrodites. The ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ scenario allowing for dangerous de facto heterosexual relations or unwitting homosexual relations in such places is discussed in Alice Domurat Dreger (1997) ‘Hermaphrodites in Love: The Truth of the Gonads’ in Vernon A. Rosario (ed.) Science and Homosexualities (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 50–2.
Nerea Aresti (2001) Médicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas. Los ideales de feminidad y masculinidad en el primer tercio del siglo XX (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea), pp. 137–43, focuses on the relations between masculinity, values, productivity, gender and work in the first third of the twentieth century.
Londa Schiebinger (1993) Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science (London: HarperCollins), p. 10. This section draws on Cleminson and Vázquez García, Hermaphroditism, pp. 82–5.
The uneven nineteenth century in Spain, dogged by dynastic civil wars, the struggle between conservatives and liberals, between absolutism and democracy, between secularism and Catholicism, is discussed in the context of the formation of national identity in José Álvarez Junco (2001) Mater dolorosa: La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus).
On the difficulties of constructing a national state in this context see Santos Juliá (2004) Historias de las dos Españas (Madrid: Taurus), pp. 47–8 and passim. Juliá writes that both the liberal and the Catholic tradition drew upon a national myth of unity, the first based on opposition to Napoleon’s invasion in 1808 and the establishment of the first democratic Spanish parliament, the second, on a trans-historical ‘natural’ localized democracy heavily imbued with religious sentiment: ‘In both [traditions], an eternal nation had been corrupted in its true self by an extraneous element: the extraneous, in the liberal account, was despotism and its consequences; in the Catholic version, the revolution and its ideological framework, the Enlightenment and liberalism’ (p. 52).
For an overview in English, see Raymond Carr, ‘Liberalism and Reaction, 1833–1931’ in Raymond Carr (ed.) (2000) Spain: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 205–42.
Thomas Laqueur (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press).
Susan Kirkpatrick (1989) ‘Spanish Liberalism and the Romantic Subject’ in Las Románticas: Women Writers and Subjectivity in Spain, 1835–1850 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press), pp. 37–61;
Bridget Aldaraca (1991) El ángel del Hogar: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain (Chapel Hill and Valencia: University of North Carolina, Dept. of Romance Languages/Artes Gráficas Soler);
Catherine Jagoe (1994) Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press);
Jo Labanyi (2000) Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
One of the first studies on Krausism in Spain was the original Spanish version of 1956 of Juan López-Morillas (1981) The Krausist Movement and Ideological Change in Spain, 1854–1874, trans. Frances M. López-Morillas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
See also Elías Díaz (1973) La filosofía social del krausismo español (Madrid: Cuadernos para el Diálogo). Carr, ‘Liberalism’, p. 218, defines Krausism as a ‘mystique rather than a philosophical system’, which ‘is best described as a version of the Protestant ethic of self-improvement, laying great emphasis on education and, in contrast to imported positivism, on moral purpose rather than utility as a recipe for Spain’s regeneration’.
Aldaraca, El ángel del Hogar, p. 66. The different role of women in the construction of the home and the education that girls should receive are analysed extensively in Giuliana Di Febo (1976) ‘Orígenes del debate feminista en España. La escuela krausista y la Institución Libre de Enseñanza (1870–1890)’, Sistema, 12, 49–82. Di Febo illustrates how later liberal thinkers such as Giner de los Ríos and Adolfo González Posada never went beyond ‘the most advanced liberal reformism’ (p. 80) and refused to sanction the more radical positions taken by the workers’ movement on this subject (pp. 67–8).
Jagoe, Ambiguous Angels, p. 18. See Nancy Armstrong (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Jagoe, Ambiguous Angels, pp. 19–20. On these changes see also Carmen Martín Gaite (1987) Usos amorosos del dieciocho en España (Barcelona: Anagrama).
Manuel Suárez Cortina (2000) El gorro frigio. Liberalismo, Democracia y Republicanismo en la Restauración (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva), pp. 26, 54–6.
Michel Foucault (1992) Genealogía del racismo (Madrid: La Piqueta), p. 39.
See Vázquez García and Moreno Mengíbar, Sexo y Razón, pp. 202–3; José Martínez Pérez (1988) ‘Sobre la incorporación del método experimental a la medicina legal española: el estudio de las manchas de sangre en la obra de Lecha-Marzo’ in Mariano Esteban Piñero et al. (eds) Estudios sobre Historia de la Ciencia y de la Técnica (Actas del IV Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas) (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León), pp. 833–44. It was Dr Mateo Seoane who advocated the organization of medicine in Spain into two branches in 1837: Legal Medicine and Public Hygiene.
See Juan Casco Solís (1990) ‘La higiene sexual en el proceso de institucionalización de la sanidad pública española’, Asclepio, 42:2, 223–52, p. 227.
Foucault, Herculine Barbin. On Tardieu see R. Huertas García-Alejo (1990) ‘El concepto de “perversión sexual” en la medicina positivista’, Asclepio, 42:2, 89–99, pp. 91–4;
Vernon A. Rosario (1997) The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 72–7.
F.M. Foderé (1801–03 [1798]) Las Leyes Ilustradas por las Ciencias Físicas o Tratado de Medicina Legal y de Higiene Pública, 8 vols (Madrid: n.p.)
J.L. Peset and M. Peset (1975) ‘Estudio preliminar’, Lombroso y la Escuela Positivista Italiana (Madrid: CSIC), pp. 80–1.
Mateo Orfila (1847) Tratado de Medicina Legal, 4 vols (Madrid: Imprenta de Don José María Alonso), I, p. 3. Emphasis in original. This version was translated from the fourth French edition and was updated in accordance with the Spanish legislation of the time by Dr Enrique Ataide from the Madrid Faculty of Medicine.
Orfila, Tratado, p. 166. In a later section, under ‘De la impotencia’ (pp. 170–83), it was pointed out that the lack of a penis or testicles, the existence of hypospadias or organic vices of the genitalia, could be causes of impotence. Impotence may not be a just cause for the annulment of marriage, but infertility continued to be so. That impotence was a matter to be determined medically and publicly in France up to this time is shown in Pierre Darmon (1985 [1979]) Trial by Impotence, trans. Paul Keegan (London: Chatto and Windus).
See Cleminson and Medina Doménech, ‘¿Mujer u hombre?’, p. 73; Richard M. Cleminson (2004) ‘The Significance of the “Fairy” for the Cultural Archaeology of Same-Sex Male Desire in Spain, 1850–1930’, Sexualities, 7:4, 412–29, pp. 417–20.
Ramón Alba y López (1860) ‘Caso de hermafroditismo, presentado á la consulta clínica del Dr. Ulibarri’, La España Médica, V, pp. 256, 265; (1861) ‘Operación practicada por el Dr. Ulibarri en el caso de hermafrodismo que ha habido en su clínica — Reflexiones acerca de ella’, La España Médica, VI, pp. 294, 455–6.
E. Hofman (1891) Tratado de Medicina Legal, 2 vols (Madrid: Administración de la Revista de Medicina y Cirugía Prácticas), II, pp. 506–9.
See the case of Catalina de Erauso, the ‘Nun Ensign’, discussed by Mary Elizabeth Perry (1999) ‘From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and Gendering the Self in the New World of Imperial Spain’ in Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (eds) Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham and London: Duke University Press), pp. 394–419.
There are many examples of cross-dressing women in the army in different cultures. For one discussion see Marjorie Garber (1993) Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 54–6.
Charles J. Esdaile (1988) The Spanish Army in the Peninsular War (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), p. 10.
Stanley Payne (1967) Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (Stanford and London: Stanford University Press and Oxford University Press), p. 32;
Geoffrey Jensen (2002) Irrational Triumph: Cultural Despair, Military Nationalism, and the Ideological Origins of Franco’s Spain (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press), p. 23.
According to Joan Connelly Ullman, at the end of the nineteenth century, this payment had risen to 1500 pesetas: Ullman (1968) The Tragic Week: A Study in Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 25.
. Charles J. Esdaile (2000) Spain in the Liberal Age: From Constitution to Civil War, 1808–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 71.
Disqualification for military service in this ‘Reglamento’ was based, as can be seen from the list reproduced, on physical and mental deficiencies, not moral ones. The moralizing nature of medicine with respect to prostitution, hygiene, illegality and sexuality from the mid-nineteenth century onwards is discussed in Fernando álvarez–Uría (1983) Miserables y locos: Medicina mental y orden social en la España del siglo XIX (Barcelona: Tusquets), pp. 172–80 and passim.
The first of these was Ángel Pulido y Fernández (1880) ‘Lactancia paterna’, Revista de Medicina y Cirugía Prácticas, VI, 305–16.
Ángel Pulido y Fernández (1880) ‘Lactancia paterna’, Revista de Medicina y Cirugía Prácticas, VI, 363–75.
Rafael Nevado Requena (1906) ‘El hipospadias y hermafroditismo aparente’, El Siglo Médico, 2740 (16 June), 373–5, p. 374.
Antonio Morales (1923) ‘Hipospadias’, El Siglo Médico, 3626 (9 June), 549–50, p. 550.
Magdalena Gawin (2008) ‘The Sex Reform Movement and Eugenics in Interwar Poland’ in Martin Richards, Alison Sinclair and Richard Cleminson (eds) ‘Eugenics, Sex, and the State’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 39:2, 181–6. For this appreciation Gawin draws on R. Cooter, M. Harrison and S. Sturdy (eds) (1998) War, Medicine and Modernity (Stroud: Sutton Publishing), p. 22.
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© 2011 Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García
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Cleminson, R., García, F.V. (2011). The Hermaphrodite, Fecundity and Military Efficiency: Dangerous Subjects in the Emerging Liberal Order of Nineteenth-Century Spain. In: Fisher, K., Toulalan, S. (eds) Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354128_4
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