I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between gender and the sexed body this month. No wonder. Not only is it Pride month, but on June 12th the President signed an executive order erasing healthcare protections for transgender persons, and only a few days later, the US Supreme Court ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects LGTBQ people. All month I’ve wrestled with how to celebrate Pride on this blog, as well as how best to explain history of sexuality during the early modern period. When asserting that people should be treated according to the sex assigned them at birth, politicians and pundits often harken to some ill-defined European or biblical past when men were men and women were women. Sorry to burst your bubble, but sex and gender have never been so easy to pin down. There have always been disputed, ambiguous, queer bodies, just as there have always been those who have attempted to reduce them to simple binaries.
Take the case of bearded women, of which several portraits and many prints and pamphlets exist. At one level, these images demonstrate the instability of early modern sex and gender, for beards were regarded as important signifiers of maleness. On another level, however, religious and medical authorities often attempted to fit these queer bodies into existing categories of male and female. That said, we’ll see that a plethora of responses to bearded women existed, some of which acknowledge the possibility of a third sex.
In Giuseppe Ribera’s Magdalena Ventura and her Son (1631), we see a family grouping. Magdalena stands at the center dressed in women’s clothes, but sporting a long beard and rugged, masculine facial features. One bared breast and the infant suckling it are starkly lit. Magdalena’s husband has a shorter beard than his wife, and stands behind her in the shadows. To the right Ribera included a spindle and a snail atop a stone marker bearing an inscription which refers to Magdalena as a “wonder of nature.”
The inscription situates Magdalena within the Renaissance conception of marvels and even monsters, beings whose physical differences defined the very limits of what was natural. As I argued last month, beings such as harpies and giants were also used to police the borders of gender, as those who transgressed gender norms might be referred to as monsters, marvels or wonders – that is, as beyond the norms of human existence. Visually, the painting participates in constructing Magdalena’s body as non-normative, but it also carries religious overtones that complicate easy understandings of the painting as an early example of “freak portrait photography,”* that is, 19th and 20th-century images of freak show performers that often juxtapose normative bodies with those of the freak show performers.
Renaissance physicians, who had a humoral theory of the body, attributed female beards to an excess of heat and dryness, both male characteristics that caused the sprouting forth of hair. Women were supposed to be cool and moist, a humoral situation that inhibited the growth of facial hair. Thus, women who grew beards had literally contravened nature, and were often accused of acting inappropriately. Men were advised to control their wives, as masculine behaviors such as “boldness” might produce a beard. In contrast to our modern view of the body as alterable to reflect gender identity, in the early modern period the performance of gender could reshape the bodyzz.
While art historians often praise Ribera for his extreme naturalism, there’s something a little off in this painting. Magdalena’s masculine features, clothing, and rugged hands are all carefully described, and her bared breast is even pendulous with milk. Yet, she seems to have only one breast that springs from her collar bone and sits almost at the center of her chest. Ribera is consciously evoking the image of the Madona lactans (lactating Madonna). Images of the breast-feeding Virgin such as that from the workshop of Joos van Cleve (below, left) often dislocate her single breast, a strategy that was likely intended to guard against lascivious thoughts on the part of the beholder. Images of a more naturalistic Madonna with two breasts exist, as do images of the Virgin accompanied by her husband, Joseph (below, center), but these are rare. Even Leonardo da Vinci depicted the Virgin Mary with one, highly placed breast (below, right).
Magdalena’s body is both freakish and sanctified, a “wonder of nature” created by God. But it is a body that physicians and theologians labeled as female – this was precisely the source of her fame. Other women who grew beards might transform into men, for example the Spanish nun María Muñoz, who developed male genitalia after heavy physical labor, then developed a beard and deepened voice. She was determined to be a man and sent home from the convent. What we see, then, is that authorities attempted to label queer bodies as male or female, and that the persons themselves often accepted such binaries. Elena/o de Céspedes, a freed slave born a woman, but who developed male genitalia, argued that s/he was a hermaphrodite, having characteristics of both sexes. Yet, a surgeon’s cut had freed Eleona/o’s male member, making her a man whose dress, profession and sexual relations were all masculine.
Yet, a tantalizing hint of a third way exists in an emblem book from early 17th-century Spain. In an image titled”Neither and both” (right) Sebastián de Covarrubias depicted a woman with a curly, bushy beard. The text declares her a “monster, horrendous and strange,” which tracks with the common approach to such women. But Covarrubias also writes, “I am a man, I am a woman, I am a third party,” which suggests that early modern people recognized the possibility of a third, if monstrous, gender.
It is impossible to know the bodies of these women and men. In fact, trying to know their bodies smacks of contemporary fixations on the surgeries and genitals of trans people. What we can know is that Renaissance people (including the Catholic Church) acknowledged the possibility of sex change. While they were predominantly interested in fitting queer bodies into normative labels, there were also those who recognized a third way that was both man and woman, and neither. So, for those who say that gender and sex are the same thing as ordained by nature or God or whoever, and that ideas of ambiguity and non-conforming genders and sexes are new, we have only to look at the Renaissance to see the long history of queerness.
Truthfully, a lot of the literature on Ribera’s portrait is by non-art historians who tend to miss the visual complexity of the work. Similarly, much of the work on bearded women tends to assume either fluidity or fixedness, without, I believe, examining the nuances of early modern attitudes towards these persons. That said, I looked at the following when writing this blog: Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (Manchester University Press, 2006); Sherry Velasco, “Hairy Women on Display in Textual and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain,” South Atlantic Review 72 (2007): 62-75.
*This term comes from Rachel Adams’s Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2001). It appears in most of the English-language literature on Ribera’s portrait.
The Renaissance Uncensored 