Abstract
The sources of the androgyne, despite their disparate origins and purposes, have in common that they treat the androgyne condition as a state that provides individuals access to the highest aspirations and greatest strengths by allowing them access to the full range of human qualities. Transcending biological sex, largely transcending the body, the androgyne is at base a figure of completion or plenitude. If neither biological sex, and perhaps not even the human body, is the operative mode of classifying humans who are nonetheless seen as masculine and feminine, some variant of the idea of gender must be in play, one that, although distinct from the modern concept of gender, may usefully coexist with it. In what follows, this will be called functional gender, a mode of gendering that can be seen to allow all humans potential access to the functions or roles that in traditional societies were customarily attributed to a single sex. In this system, an individual can honorably perform functions conventionally attributed to the opposite sex. The imputation of transgression that might be expected to be attached itself to such breaches of decorum is not applicable; often rather the effect is just the opposite, moving the perception of the person who performs these actions toward human perfection, toward the imago Dei. The marks of such a habit of thought can be found in Western culture over a very long period, found in texts ranging from the Hebrew Bible to sixteenth-century European literature, the central ground of this study.
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Notes
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Rutledge, 1990), p. 33.
Helen J. Swift, Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France, 1440–1538 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2008), p. 22.
Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (Dec. 1986): 1057.
Nathalie Zemon Davis’s essay “Women on Top” (Society and Culture in Early Modern France [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975], pp.124–51), was a pioneer here too. For an Anglo-Saxon overview, see Sonya O. Rose, What is Gender History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
The bibliography on this subject has grown vast, starting with Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978)
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1, La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
Guy Poirier, L’homosexualité dans l’imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris: H. Champion, 1996) and the more recent work of Gary Ferguson and Marc Schlachter. These and many others are part of a history (or histories, anthropologies, and sociologies) of sexuality, largely distinct from the present inquiry.
Natalie Zemon Davis cites a defense of the king bee as late as 1742 (Davis, “Women on Top” pp. 125–26, n.3). It was not until the Encyclopédie (article: abeille) that the observations of natural scientists were able to overcome preconceived notions of hierarchy. The bees’ king was then demoted to “abeille mère” [mother bee] who existed for the sole purpose of laying eggs; the serfs were understood to be males, useful only to fertilize those eggs, then destroyed by the colony; the worker bees were pronounced sexless, having no reproductive role. Davis refers to J. Simon, Le Gouvernement admirable ou la République des abeilles (Paris: 1742). My attention was drawn to these later developments by Kathleen P. Long’s reference to the king bee and to Davis’s work at the start of her own Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 1. For more about bees in the Renaissance, see Jonathan Woolfson, “The Renaissance of Bees,” Renaissance Studies 24, no. 2 (2009): 281–300.
David P. LaGuardia, Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 17.
Laura McClure, Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 97–98.
Carolyn Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001).
Jean Lecointe, L’Idéal et la différence: la perception de la personnalité littéraire à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1993) pp.123–24: “Le caractère masculin est violent, impulsif, sans rancune, généreux, droit, ne se laisse amoindrir, ni duper par l’artifice et par la ruse, souhaite l’emporter par le mérite, et est magnanime. Le caractère féminin est ingénieux, coléreux, rancunier, sans pitié, sans résistance à la fatigue, porté à s’instruire, hypocrite, acariâtre, irréfléchi, et peureux.” As Lecointe notes, normal gender lines are readily transgressed in this system: “On trouve aussi un type masculin dans le féminin et un féminin dans le masculin.” [A masculine type can be found in the feminine and a feminine in the masculine.]
Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 209
Quoted in Caroline Walker Bynum, “‘... And Woman His Humanity’: Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages,” in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 267.
François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Boulenger (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p.966. Translation mine. The Latin aluisti, from alo, has a range of meanings: feed, nourish, rear, nurse, suckle, cherish, support. The cluster of meanings suggests that, in terms of the present discussion, the word is functionally gendered feminine, as is apparent when the same image appears in Ronsard’s early ode “À Jan Dorat”: “Et combien je fu heureus/Suçer le laict savoureus/De ta feconde mammelle” [And how happy I was to suckle the savory milk of your eloquent breast] (Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, 1:pp.135–38, ll.4–6). More light is cast on Rabelais’s image if one considers that a source may be Severus of Milevis’s letter to Augustine: “Sweetest brother, it is good for me to be with you through your writings. I rejoice to be bound more closely to you, and gain my strength from the overflowing richness of your breasts” (Quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo [Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969], p.201). Whether or not this was part of Rabelais’s direct inspiration—there may well be earlier uses I have failed to find—it suggests that the image was ready at hand from classical times forward.
Jean Dorat, “Ad doctissimam virginem Camillam Morellam,” in Les Odes latines, ed. Genevieve Demerson (Clermont-Ferrand: Université de Clermont-Ferrand, 1979), p. 179, ll.65–66.
Samuel F. Will, “Camille De Morel: A Prodigy of the Renaissance,” PMLA 51, no. 1 (Mar. 1936): 83–119
Philip Ford, “Camille de Morel: Female Erudition in the French Renaissance,” in (Re)Inventing the Past: Essays on the French Renaissance in Honour of Ann Moss (Durham: Durham Modern Languages Series, 2003), pp. 245–59.
Spanish examples are reported by Grace E. Coolidge in her Guardianship, Gender, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain (Farnam: Ashgate, 2011). Coolidge explains that when a Spanish noblewoman accepted the responsibility of guardianship, she became “legally male,” echoing the shift expressed in Montaigne’s will.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 87.
Lynn Meskell, ´The Irresistible Body and the Seduction of Archaeology,” Changing Bodies, Changing Meaning, ed. Dominic Montserrat. (London: Routledge, 1998) pp. 142–43
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Research on the history of sex in the past fifteen or twenty years suggests that it might be wise to nuance Laqueur’s distinction; Meskell’s point here is not dependent upon it.
See on this subject Francis Bertin, “Corps spirituel et androgynie chez Jean Scot Érigène,” in L’Androgyne, Cahiers de l’Hermétisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986), pp. 63–128.
Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 108. This essay and the whole collection are rich in examples begging to be read as functional gender. A few pages previous, Bynum writes of a general tendency on the part of medieval Christians who “often went so far as to treat Christ’s flesh as female, at least in certain of its salvific functions, especially its bleeding and nurturing,” concluding, “we must consider the mixing or fusing of genders implicit in medieval assumptions” (Ibid., p. 104).
Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 141, 148.
A striking example of this can be seen in the drawings of Suor Domenica da Pardiso as ‘alter Christus’, dated ca. 1506, depicting the nun and the crucified Christ on facing pages as mirror images. See Megan Callahan, “Suor Domenica da Pardiso as ‘alter Christus’: Portraits of a Renaissance Mystic,” Sixteenth Century Journal 43, no. 3 (2012): 323–50. Bynum identifies imitatio Christi as the strongest pull on the hearts of the religious, regardless of sex—nuns quite as much as monks (Bynum “‘... And Woman His Humanity,’” p.259). For the continuation of the imitatio Christi tradition well into the early modern period
see Maximilian Von Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant Translations of the Imitatio Christi, 1425–1650: From Late Medieval Classic to Early-Modern Bestseller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
Helene P. Foley, “Reverse Similes and Sex Roles in the Odyssey,” in Women in the Ancient World: the Arethusa Papers, ed. John Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan (Albany: SUNY Albany Press, 1984), p. 73.
Carroll Moulton, Similes in the Homeric Poems (Göttingen: Vandehoek and Ruprecht, 1977), p. 142.
Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Although in Greek theater male actors played women’s roles, their words were nonetheless heard as those of a woman.
Mary Harlow, “In the Name of the Father: Procreation, Paternity, and Patriarchy,” in Thinking Men: Masculinity and Its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 166.
Modern Dante criticism, too, is filled with observations of his use of crossgendering, often accompanied by an implicit understanding of plenitude. See for example Joan M. Ferrante, Dante’s Beatrice, Priest of an Androgynous God (Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1992)
Carolyn Lund-Meade, “Notes on Androgyny in the Commedia,” Lectura Danatis 10 (1992): 70–79
Jeffry T. Schnapp, “Dante’s Sexual Solecisms: Gender and Genre in the Commedia,” Romanic Review 79, no. 1 (1988): 143–63
Olivia Holmes, Dante’s Two Beloveds (New Haven: Yale, 2008).
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Rothstein, M. (2015). On Functional Gender. In: The Androgyne in Early Modern France. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137541376_3
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