The macroclitoride, the tribade and the woman: Configuring gender and sexuality in English anatomical discourse

Textual Practice

Volumn 13, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 509-532

  Braunschneider, Theresa ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Anatomy; Clitoris; History of sexuality; Lesbianism; Parsons, James; Tribade

Indexed keywords

EID: 0003438758     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502369908582353     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. James Parsons, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites (London: J. Walthoe, 1741), p. 6. Henceforth, page numbers will be included in the text.
2. In his characterization of the hermaphrodite as a combination of two sexes, Parsons neady defines a category that was much more ambiguous and contested in earlier periods. See, for instance, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, 'The hermaphrodite and the orders of nature: sexual ambiguity in early modern France', GLQ, 1.4 (1995), pp. 419-38, for a discussion of two competing early modern models ('intermediate sex' and 'redundant genitalia').
3. Here I am implicitly disagreeing with Thomas Laqueur, whose work I will discuss more explicidy below, and who argues that the early modern anatomical model of a continuum of genital sex produced a broad cultural inability to conceive of men and women as anything but superior and inferior versions of the same sex. Yet arguments that justify gender hierarchy based on fundamental biological difference rather than sameness can be found in many discourses (literary, legal, even anatomical) prior to the eighteenth century. For an example of an argument that explicates this disagreement with Laqueur, see Gail Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modem England(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
4. My emphasis on the discursive specificity of texts like Parsons' distinguishes my approach from that taken by other scholarship addressing the Enquiry. In recent work on the eighteenth-century history of sexuality, sex and gender, the Enquiry has received some passing attention but is consistently situated among (and its project not distinguished from) the sorts of scandalous and sensationalist materials that Parsons positions his text against. See Julia Epstein, 'Either/or - neither/both: sexual ambiguity and the ideology of gender', Genders7 (1990), p. 125;
5. Randolph Trumbach, 'London's Sapphists: from three sexes to four genders in the making of modern culture', in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Roudedge, 1991), pp. 119-21;
6. Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 50; and Ian McCormick (ed.) Sexual Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th- and 18th-Century Writing (New York: Roudedge, 1997), pp. 34-48.
7. For an engaging discussion of such exhibitions in terms of eighteenth-century discourses of monstrosity, see Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
8. For information on Parsons' life and publications, see the Dictionary of National Biography, and John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812-1816), pp. v, 472ff.
9. see also Valerie Traub, "The psychomorphology of the clitoris', GLQ, 2 (1995), pp. 81-113, esp. pp. 84-5;
10. Feher M. Amor veneris, vel dulcedo appeletur Fragments for a History of the Human Body 1989 90-131 New York: Urzone
11. For a critique of the simplicity of Laqueur's model, see Daston and Park, 'Hermaphrodites';
12. and Park and Robert A. Nye, 'Destiny is anatomy', New Republic, 18 (1991), pp. 53-7.
13. For a study that delineates at length the complexities and conflicts in medieval medical models of sex and reproduction (other than Laqueur's 'one-sex model'), see Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
14. The tribade does, however, undergo a different trajectory in other discourses, particularly narrative fiction. See, for instance, Susan Lanser's work on the 'Sapphic picaresque', forthcoming in Queering the Eighteenth Century, ed. Jonathan Kramnick.
15. Realdo Colombo, quoted in Katherine Park, 'The rediscovery of the clitoris', in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modem Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 177. The present discussion draws a composite picture from the texts I will discuss below.
16. I write here about a historical time frame that is generally considered to be prior to the codification and systematization of heterosexuality as a hegemonic system. For the most influential (though historically vague) delineation of such an argument, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978). Yet I find it entirely appropriate to reference heteronormativity in these texts. Potentially reproductive male-female copulation is most certainly construed as normative in discussions of the clitoris; it is a standard that is produced in large part through the abjection of the figure of the woman-desiring woman. Such discussions might, in fact, be considered a register of a developing systemati- zation of heterosexuality. This is not to say that reproductive heterosexuality in these discussions is necessarily produced as standard against other sorts of male-female sexuality, however: reproductive sex is foregrounded because reproductive organs are being anatomized. For an intriguing discussion of the shifting historical importance of intercourse in male-female sexuality, see Henry Abelove, 'Some speculations on the history of sexual intercourse during the long eighteenth century in England', Genders, 6 (1989), pp. 125-30. See also Tim Hitchcock, 'Redefining sex in eighteenth-century England', History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996), pp. 73-90.
17. Microcosmographia, a Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), p. 238.
18. As Crooke suggests, English law does not proscribe female-female sexual acts, as did some early modern European legal codes. For a discussion of differing early modern sodomy statutes regarding women, see Valerie Traub, 'Early modern Europe', in The Encyclopedia of Lesbianism, ed. Bonnie Zimmerman (forthcoming).
19. Anthropometamorphosis, or the Artificiali Changeling (London, 1654), p. 217.
20. A Sure Guide (London, 1657), pp. 82-3.
21. Bartholin's Anatomie (London, 1668), p. 76.
22. Conjugal Love; or, the Pleasures of the Marriage Bed Considered (20th edn) (London, 1750). This text was first published in the mid-seventeenth century and remained extraordinarily popular, going through over thirty editions during the eighteenth century.
23. Discours sur les hermaphrodits (Paris: Pierre Ramier, 1614), p. 79.
24. Translated in Katherine Park, 'Rediscovery', p. 181.
25. Erotomania, ora Treatise on Love Sickness (2nd edn) (Oxford: Edward Forrest, 1645), p. 15.
26. Shakespearean Negotiations (California, 1988), p. 74, emphasis added.
27. John Rider, Rider's Dictionarie (1649);
28. Randall Cotgrave, Dictionarie of the French and English Tongue (1611);
29. John Florio, Queen Anna's New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tongues (1611);
30. John Minsheu, Ductor in Linguas and Vocabularium Hispanicolatinum (Guide into the Tongues and a Most Copious Spanish Dictionary).
31. Ysbrand van Diemberbroeck, Anatomy of Human Bodies, trans. William Salmon (London: Edward Brewster, 1689), p. 182.
32. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book [1761] (New York: Garland, 1985), p. 45.
33. The OED's first definition of 'person' includes 'part played. guise, semblance; one of the characters in a play or story'; the third reads, 'The living body of a human being.'.
34. James T. Henke, Renaissance Dramatic Bawdy (Exclusive of Shakespeare): an Annotated Glossary and Critical Essays (University at Salzburg, 1974).
35. I should note here that a user/used economy is more important than the actual gender positions of the subjects involved in any given sexual encounter; thus, male-male pederastic relationships also get figured as use in the seventeenth century - not, in my construction, because the penetrated body is 'feminized', but because an active-passive binary is assumed. See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982).
36. and Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
37. The Anatomical Lectures of William Harvey: Prelectiones Anatomiae Universalis De Musculis, trans. and ed. Gwenedi Whitteridge (Edinburgh, 1964), p. 179.
38. Quoted in Patricia Parker, 'Gender ideology, gender change: the case of Marie Germain', Critical Inquiry, 19.2 (1993), p. 362 n.54.
39. Carol Kazmierczak Manzione, 'Sex in Tudor London: abusing their bodies with each other', in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodem West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 87-100.
40. Here my reading differs significantly from Laqueur's. A primary feminist critique of his work in Making Sex is that his readings of the homology between clitoris and penis remove women altogether from any sexual equation - because it involves two penises, all sex between two parties becomes sex between two men. For a concise articulation of this critique, see Traub, pp. 84-5.
41. History of Generation (London: John Martin, 1651), p. 85.
42. William Cheselden, Anatomy of the Humane Body (London: N. Cliff, D. Jackson, W. Innys, 1713). While this first edition includes numerous copper plates, only later did the text become the lavishly illustrated anatomy usually associated with Cheselden.
43. James Drake, Anthropologia Nova, or a New System of Anatomy (London: 1707), p. 279.