Probleme of Sexes : representing the Renaissance hermaphrodite
Probleme of Sexes : representing the Renaissance hermaphrodite
This thesis addresses the way in which the hermaphrodite troubled Renaissance ideas about gender, sexuality and the sexed body. It explores how the hermaphrodite was represented in primarily English texts and images throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As well as literary and artistic representations of sexual ambiguity, the thesis examines legal and medical case histories, popular ballads and broadsides, and treatises about monsters and prodigies. It traces a trajectory from the late sixteenth-century depictions of the hermaphrodite as a figure of erotic ambiguity to its representation within an emerging culture of colonial, scientific and pornographic excitement in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.
Drawing from Ovid's founding myth of Hermaphroditus, the thesis focuses on the disjunctures between the spiritual and philosophical ideal of androgyny, and the cultural confusion generated by hermaphroditic figures. Hermaphroditism disturbed rigid systems of definition and the hermaphrodite was used to signal wider cultural anxieties about moral and social decay.
The study focuses on the gender debates of the 1620s and the propaganda of the English Revolution to illustrate the way in which the monstrous hermaphrodite was figured as a fitting symbol for the fragmentation of traditionally gendered political structures. It also addresses the hermaphroditic processes of artistic and scientific (pro)creativity in the works of John Milton, Francis Bacon and William Harvey. The thesis aims not only to show that the hermaphrodite challenged what it meant to be, or to act like, a man or a woman in Renaissance culture, but also to highlight the ways in which sexually ambiguous figures provoked a questioning of what it meant to be human.
University of Southampton
Gilbert, Ruth
52d0021a-1ed2-4021-a11a-b3a344095a6e
1996
Gilbert, Ruth
52d0021a-1ed2-4021-a11a-b3a344095a6e
Gilbert, Ruth
(1996)
Probleme of Sexes : representing the Renaissance hermaphrodite.
University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.
Record type:
Thesis
(Doctoral)
Abstract
This thesis addresses the way in which the hermaphrodite troubled Renaissance ideas about gender, sexuality and the sexed body. It explores how the hermaphrodite was represented in primarily English texts and images throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As well as literary and artistic representations of sexual ambiguity, the thesis examines legal and medical case histories, popular ballads and broadsides, and treatises about monsters and prodigies. It traces a trajectory from the late sixteenth-century depictions of the hermaphrodite as a figure of erotic ambiguity to its representation within an emerging culture of colonial, scientific and pornographic excitement in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.
Drawing from Ovid's founding myth of Hermaphroditus, the thesis focuses on the disjunctures between the spiritual and philosophical ideal of androgyny, and the cultural confusion generated by hermaphroditic figures. Hermaphroditism disturbed rigid systems of definition and the hermaphrodite was used to signal wider cultural anxieties about moral and social decay.
The study focuses on the gender debates of the 1620s and the propaganda of the English Revolution to illustrate the way in which the monstrous hermaphrodite was figured as a fitting symbol for the fragmentation of traditionally gendered political structures. It also addresses the hermaphroditic processes of artistic and scientific (pro)creativity in the works of John Milton, Francis Bacon and William Harvey. The thesis aims not only to show that the hermaphrodite challenged what it meant to be, or to act like, a man or a woman in Renaissance culture, but also to highlight the ways in which sexually ambiguous figures provoked a questioning of what it meant to be human.
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Published date: 1996
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Local EPrints ID: 459590
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/459590
PURE UUID: 0d3edab4-5c10-465f-80a3-020bb7b76a61
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Date deposited: 04 Jul 2022 17:14
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 18:31
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Author:
Ruth Gilbert
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