Thinking About Context

Abstract

he Gendered Nose and its Lack” raises a disturbing question about facial mutilation over time and place, namely whether it has been a stable signifier and is irrevocably gendered. The author has chosen medieval incidents of nose-cutting over a broad swath of Eurasia to compare with the highly publicized nose and ears mutilation of a young Afghani woman, Aisha bibi, when she fled her husband’s home in 2010 in a region controlled by the Taliban. The Western press sensationalized the incident as barbaric and “medieval,” prompting the author to review incidents of nose-cutting from the Middle Ages in regard to vindication of men’s honor through permanent and visible disfigurement of women believed to have brought dishonor to them. Applying comparisons temporally often implies evolutionary notions about more enlightened societal attitudes in regions that develop into modern societies, an assumption frequently belied by the facts. A husband’s slashing of Tracey Thurman’s face in Torrington, Connecticut in 1983 led to changes in police responses and to funding for shelters for victims of domestic violence in the United States that are as necessary today as they were in any earlier era. 1 There is not much of an argument for facial disfigurement as something others do for those of us who live in contemporary America. Surely the author’s posed question: “does nose-cutting in fact still represent a meaningful, corporal punishment that modernity has not erased?” must be answered in the affirmative, at least in regard to the modernity component. This is a crime that still appeals to some perpetrators. Still the author sees a comparison to medieval times as valuable because of an “over-arching humanity [allowing] characters to learn from one another across the temporal gap.” This may be possible, but only if the context of these acts allows for apt comparisons. The author sees the medieval display of a woman’s mutilated face as sado-pornographic and interprets such slashings as retaliation for dishonor when perpetrated by a husband on a wife. The gendered nose-cutting examples associated with men’s honor the author found begin with the Book of Ezekiel (23:23), where God threatens the prostitute Aholibah: “They will cut off your nose and your ears.” The examples continue with mutilated and disobedient nuns in the History of the Franks of Gregory of Tours and then the author speaks of Jordanes’s Getica in which the first wife of Huneric the Vandal was sent back to her father, Theoderic the Goth, with her nose and ears cut off; all are horrendous examples. The next examples are drawn from Byzantine sources and from the laws of King Canute in eleventh-century England. The Khalila