Male, Female or In-Between? The Science of Hermaphroditism in Spain, 1850-1960

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

At least since Ovid's story in Book IV of his Metamorphoses, in which the gods Hermes and Aphrodite, embodiments of ideal manhood and womanhood, had a son named Hermaphroditos, has hermaphroditism been a subject of fascination for the West. Hermaphroditos was also a perfect man but his encounter with the nymph Salamacis, who requested that the gods united her to the boy, resulted in Hermaphrodite, a body with double sex or 'in-between' status. Such a story fired the western literary and medical imagination both for its attractiveness /the harmonious combination of two 'opposites' in one body / and for its marvellous or unsettling nature/ the mixing of the two sexes that would neither be one nor the other but which might signify great good or evil to come.The hermaphrodite as a marvellous entity continued in the western imagination amongst natural philosophers and literary exponents until the eighteenth century when a profound transformation took place. The 'real' human hermaphrodite, actually uniting more than one sex, slowly lost currency as secularization and changes in science took place. From this period, the real hermaphrodite was declared impossible in humans and scientists began to talk about 'pseudo-hermaphrodites' or bodies that appeared to combine the two sexes. From the early nineteenth century, doctors presented with cases of ambiguous sex drew up taxonomies for the identification of the real biological sex, often for legal purposes or for permission to marry. Instead of classifying most of these persons as real hermaphrodites, they graded the differences between the sexes and allowed for the combination of different traits of each sex in the same body. On this basis, a final declaration would be made as to the real sex of the person. Thus, under the category of pseudo-hermaphroditism individuals could be designated male pseudo-hermaphrodites if they were judged to be primarily male and female pseudo-hermaphrodites if the opposite were true.What methods of diagnosis allowed doctors to identify the real sex of the body? If previous methods had utilized primarily sight and touch as the principal tool for sex identification by examining the external genitalia, from the early to mid-nineteenth century the criteria aiding identification changed to incorporate a broader variety of characteristics including comportment, hirsuteness, timbre of voice, existence of breasts and gestures. From the late nineteenth century, new diagnostic techniques allowed for the extirpation and analysis of the ovaries and testes under the microscope. In this way, the ovaries and the testes, or the gonads, became the overriding guideline in the determination of sex. The science of hermaphroditism, however, did not rely on sex identification from the gonads alone for long. From the 1920s, with the discovery of 'male' and 'female' hormones, endocrinological accounts of real sex took centre stage. The 'truth' of the body was now found to lie in the hormones secreted by the body and not necessarily in the gonads. However, in the 1930s it was confirmed that some hormones previously known as 'female' were found in non-hermaphroditic males and vice versa. The idea that the two sexes were radically different and incompatible led, with the aid of new psychological theories of gender development, to the notion that the sexes were graded rather than rigidly differentiated and that a variety of factors / genital, gonadal, hormonal and psychological / conferred the real sex of the person.As can be seen, changing factors were articulated by medicine in order to declare the sex of an 'intersex' individual. This research project focuses on how these processes were played out in Spain during the years 1850-1960 in order to assess whether this country followed other broadly European diagnoses of sex in line with the shift from identification being based on the genitalia, to being based on the gonads, the hormones, and, finally, psychological gender mix.