Eunuchs and Castrati : Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe.

Author/creator Crawford, Katherine, 1966-
Format Electronic
Publication InfoMilton : Routledge, 2018.
Description1 online resource (253 pages)
Supplemental ContentProQuest Ebook Central
Subjects

Contents Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication; Table of Contents; List of figures; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Introduction: Castrates, crossings, and pejorative sexual scripting; 1. Male castration and/as disability; 2. Transsexuality; 3. Sexual impairment and the making of modern sexuality; Notes; PART 1: Inceptions; 1. Making defective men: Physiology, medicine, and the therapeutics of castration; 1. Medical transformations; gender effects; 2. Castration therapeutics; 3. Toward a medical genealogy; Notes
Contents 2. The castration conundrum: Civil law creates sexual disability; 1. Roman rights and wrongs; 2. Exemplary unmanning; 3. Evasion and exclusion; 4. Castrates and legal animosity; Notes; 3. Marrying castrates, or: how to make a disabled social subject; 1. The dialectics of the religious castrate; 2. The canonists on castration; The triumph of "true semen"; 4. Marriage, scandal, and disability; 5. Instantiating disability; Notes; PART 2: Negotiations; 4. Playing the eunuch; 1. Someone wanting something, singing something; 2. Menacing eunuchs; 3. Castrates, couples, and cons
Contents 4. Conclusion, or conflating castrates; Notes; 5. The spectacular crossings of castrati; 1. Foundations; 2. Rising discord; 3. Cacophonous controversy; 4. Muffling the (semi- )men; Notes; 6. Exotic others: Racial mappings on the castrate body; 1. Defamiliarity breeds contempt; 2. Access and (the anxieties of) race; 3. Eliding complicities; Notes; Conclusion: A history of interlocking vilifications; Notes; References; Index
Summary Eunuchs and Castrati examines the enduring fascination among historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars around the figure of the castrate. Specifically, the book asks what influence such fascination had on the development and delineation of modern ideas around sexuality and physical impairment. Ranging from Greco-Roman times to the twenty-first century, Katherine Crawford brings together travel accounts, diplomatic records, and fictional sources, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate how early modern interlocutors reacted to and depictedcastrates. She reveals how medicine and law operated to maintain the privileges of bodily integrity and created and extended prejudice against those without it. In consequence, castrates were constructed as gender deviant, disabled social subjects and demarcated as inferior. Early modern cultural locithen reinforced these perceptions, encouraging an othering of castrates in public contexts. These extensive, almost obsessive accounts of appearance, social propensities, and gender characteristics of castrated men reveal the historical lineages of sexual stigma and hostility towards gender non-normative and physically impaired persons. For Crawford, they are the roots of sexual and physical prejudices that remain embedded in the western experience today.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references and index.
Source of descriptionPrint version record.
Issued in other formPrint version: Crawford, Katherine. Eunuchs and Castrati : Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe. Milton : Routledge, ©2018 9780815348641
Genre/formElectronic books.
Genre/formHistory.
ISBN9781351166355
ISBN1351166352
ISBN9781351166331
ISBN1351166336
ISBN9781351166348
ISBN1351166344
ISBN9781351166362
ISBN1351166360
ISBN0815348649
ISBN9780815348641
ISBN(hbk.)
Standard identifier# 10.4324/9781351166362
Stock number9781351166355 Ingram Content Group

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Electronic Resources Access Content Online ✔ Available