Masculinity on Trial: Penises, Hermaphrodites and the Uncertain Male Body in Early Modern France

Abstract

��� ‘Women’s Secrets’ have long been the focus of gender and medical history for the late medieval and early modern periods at the expense of investigation into male corporeality. 1 Contemporary concerns over sexual difference and the generation of healthy progeny have focused historians’ attention primarily on to the female body, especially the uterus, as a locus of contested secrets about female interiority and the mysteries of reproduction. 2 As Thomas Laqueur and more recently Edward Behrend-Martinez and Katharine Park have argued, this may be the result, in part, of a relative lack of early modern curiosity about the male body by comparison with the glut of interest in the elusive, secretive female body, which was so intimately connected with paternity and patriarchy. 3 Rather than probing the depths of the early modern male body many scholars have instead turned their attention to socially-constructed masculinity; to representations of male corporeality and to the exploration of the impact of changing ideas of civility and sociability on ideals of manliness, rather than the actual physical embodiment of manhood. 4 This is especially surprising since, contrary to Laqueur’s argument that gender overrode physical sex in this period, the ‘dividends of masculinity’ – control of family, property and participation in the civic community – were directly linked to proof of physical potency through the engendering of progeny in marriage emphasizing the link between patriarchy and the male body. 5 Although the history of men’s bodies is beginning to be incorporated into histories of bodies more generally, this interest is largely anglocentric, and little work has been done on either masculinity or its embodiment in early modern France. 6 Moreover, much of the existing historiography of the male body, influenced by the emphasis on women’s secrets, is skewed towards a fixed, generic, stable but ‘little-defined norm’ 7 of masculine corporeality against which the leaky, grotesque, mysterious and deceptive female body was mapped. The focus risks the imposition of a single, dominant interpretation of masculinity, and indeed of the male body, at the expense of a more nuanced picture of embodied masculinities. Furthermore, as this article will show, the male body was often no more straightforward or transparent than its female counterpart. The equivocal male body was no less perilous in patriarchal terms than the secrets of women. Male bodies, just like female bodies, were ‘contested sites’ and the repositories of social and cultural expectations. 8