Though eunuchs are long thought exotic relics of the past, this panel seeks to address how such an appellation, identity, and title has been mobilized across vast periods of time and distinct locations. Our special session broaches the eunuch as figuration(s) and identit(ies) that signal instances of the recent growing attention to the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in early modernity and the long eighteenth century. As historical and literary scholarship on eunuchs in various long early modern contexts (i.e. Jane Hathway and George Junne on the Ottoman; Kathryn Ringrose on the Byzantine; Elizabeth Shaun and David Ayalon on the Mamluk; Gary Taylor, Piotr Scholz, and Katherine Crawford on European contexts) has revealed, the eunuch, culturally varied in representation and role, is not a finite identity. While the title of eunuch may conjure a particular image or exoticism, the literature and texts of the period refuse the reducibility of the eunuch’s station or abilities. Eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire are different from those in Abyssinia or Egypt. The social station of the eunuch in India is different than the Italian castrato. The mediating role that Moorish eunuchs play is untranslatable to those from China. Attentive to the diverse representations of the eunuch, this panel grapples with the various renderings and manipulations of the eunuch so to further conversations that bring awareness to intersectional identities in early modernity and the long eighteenth century. We seek to explore questions such as:
How does the eunuch transgress or make multiple understandings of queerness or trans*ness?
How do various cultures, literatures, and travel narratives reveal the eunuch to a broader European audience? What of genre as a form of visibility?
In what ways does the process of castration stand in for the eunuch, and how can we distinguish between the castrate and the eunuch?
How might intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches to the figure of the eunuch allow us to access cultural and historical nuance without collapsing into “presentism”?
How can we read against the reductive “lack” associated with the eunuch to envision broader spectra of ability and mobility?
To what extent can the history of eunuchs illuminate present debates regarding gender non-confirmity, non-binary gender presentation, non-normative embodiments, and disability?
The four presenters --all at different stages of their professional careers--offer comparative analyses of the eunuch that examine readings from different cultural contexts with a focus on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, empire, location, dis/ability, and mobility. Jordan Windholdz’s paper, “Queering the Single Life of the Eunuch on the Renaissance English Stage,” examines the eunuch on the early modern stage to theorize the queerness of the eunuch in early modern English comedic drama and to historicize the role the eunuch played in normalizing marriage as primarily a cisgender, heterosexual relation as opposed to one of economics or social rank. Emily Kuffner concerns the early modern Spanish picaresque novel in her talk, “The Sexualized Eunuch in Early Modern Spain.” Kuffner works both with and against Windholz’s reading so as to understand how the eunuch’s androgynous sexuality (resulting from a violation of the male genitals) might inform a nuanced representation of plural sexualities, focusing specifically on La Niña de Los Embustes (1632). While these two panelists focus specifically on the early modern contexts, our next speakers extend their historical scope to the eighteenth century.
Our third panelist William Germano, in “The Singing Eunuch, or the Music of the Spheres,” traces the singing eunuch within the history of opera through a musical and sound studies approach to the Italian eunuch cum castrato, examining the ways in which the professionalization of the castrato has affected the sound of masculinity on the operatic stage and in real life (moving beyond the Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass paradigm). Our final panelist Unita Adhifard explores the eunuch’s role in colonial India in her talk, “'The Pleasures Social Intercourse Gives': Colonial Castration, Sexuality, and State Power in Hartly House, Calcutta” which offers an alternative history of male sexuality as a source of social evils in eighteenth-century British sentimental fiction, especially within Hartly House, Calcutta (1789). Moving from England to Spain to Italy to India, this panel interrogates a historical and geographic trajectory that demonstrates the broad visibility and location of the eunuch, as well as the cultural specificity that coheres around the eunuch across Europe and Asia.
Because of the panel’s comparative and interdisciplinary bent, we envision the audience of this panel to include scholars who are interested in intersectional analyses of race, gender, sexuality, empire, and disability. Abdulhamit Arvas, who has recently completed an article on Ottoman eunuchs, will preside the panel. We plan to offer shorter presentations (12-15 minutes in length) so as to allow for a longer group discussion--between audience and panelists--that attend to the ruptures and opportunities that a discussion of the eunuch might enable. We see this panel and its discussants (including the audience) as laying the groundwork for a series of future panels and publication opportunities that may attend to more specific representations of the eunuch in a dialogue with recent critical theories.