Eunuchs and Castrati - Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe (Paperback)

Eunuchs and Castrati examines the enduring fascination among historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars around the figure of the castrate. Specifically, the book asks what influence such fascination had on the development and delineation of modern ideas around sexuality and physical impairment. Ranging from Greco-Roman times to the twenty-first century, Katherine Crawford brings together travel accounts, diplomatic records, and fictional sources, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate how early modern interlocutors reacted to and depicted castrates. She reveals how medicine and law operated to maintain the privileges of bodily integrity and created and extended prejudice against those without it. In consequence, castrates were constructed as gender deviant, disabled social subjects and demarcated as inferior. Early modern cultural loci then reinforced these perceptions, encouraging an othering of castrates in public contexts. These extensive, almost obsessive accounts of appearance, social propensities, and gender characteristics of castrated men reveal the historical lineages of sexual stigma and hostility towards gender non-normative and physically impaired persons. For Crawford, they are the roots of sexual and physical prejudices that remain embedded in the western experience today.

General

Imprint:	Routledge
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	March 2021
First published:	2019
Authors:	Katherine Crawford
Dimensions:	234 x 156 x 19mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	240
ISBN-13:	978-0-367-90361-9
Categories:	Books > Humanities > History > World history > 1500 to 1750 Books > Humanities > History > European history > General Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Disability: social aspects Books > History > European history > General Books > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history Books > History > World history > 1500 to 1750
LSN:	0-367-90361-X
Barcode:	9780367903619

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