CHAPTER 1
Mapping the Borders of Sex
LEAH DEVUN
The medieval text Marvels of the East shares fantastic tales of monsters—giant ants, cannibal donestres, headless blemmyes, among others—that live in the “East.” The work survives in three well-known illuminated manuscripts created between the tenth and twelfth centuries, each stocked with illustrations so arresting that they nearly upstage the written text.1 In the visual images within the manuscripts, monsters seem to project themselves toward the viewer, extending beyond the bars of their illuminated frames and breaching the bounds of standard portraiture.2 Among the monsters featured in one manuscript copy of Marvels is a nonbinary-sexed figure: a standing nude, starkly drawn against a deep red background (fig. 1.1).
The figure is depicted as half-male and half-female, with a flat “masculine” chest on one side and a prominent “feminine” breast on the other. This drawing, encased in its own intact rectangular border, might seem more static than its frame-transgressing neighbors. But if other monsters breached the line between subject and object, viewer and viewed, this figure traversed perhaps even more crucial boundaries. As I’ll suggest, this Marvels dual-sexed figure—like other contemporary images of similar subjects—crossed key borders in the Middle Ages, “traveling” between the sexual domains of male and female, and setting in contrast the geographic domains of “West” and “East.” I offer a few observations about the nonbinary-sexed figure of Marvels of the East in this short essay, focusing on the figure’s role in establishing medieval boundaries of sex and space.
FIGURE 1.1. Nonbinary-sexed figure (at left), in Marvels of the East, University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 614, fol. 50v (twelfth century). With permission of the Bodleian Libraries.
The twelfth-century Anglo-Latin version of Marvels of the East—MS Bodley (the image does not appear in the other two related recensions of the text)—describes this bifurcated half-male/half-female figure as a “hermaphrodite” (ermafrodite).3 The word “hermaphrodite” is generally viewed today as an outdated and stigmatizing term, and the terms “DSD” (an abbreviation for “disorders” or “differences of sex development”) and “intersex” (which I use in this work) are widely preferred to describe modern individuals whose bodies are perceived to be neither typically male nor female.4 I use the term “hermaphrodite” here when quoting medieval texts, and I hope readers will accept my use of it as I critically engage with my original primary sources. In the course of that engagement, I try to avoid reifying derogatory language and concepts while also remaining attentive to historical specificity.5 To that end, I prefer the term “nonbinary-sexed” to refer to the medieval illustrated figures on which I focus here, although I am aware that many intersex people today do not identify as nonbinary.
I argue here that we might productively read this particular strain of medieval nonbinary imagery not only through the lens of “intersex” but also through that of “transgender.”6 Intersex people—that is, those born with bodies that are judged to be neither typically male nor female, and transgender people, that is, in simple terms, those born with bodies that do not fit their gender identity, or whose practices defy gender norms in some way—are distinct groups. In the modern world, intersex and transgender communities have different concerns and identities, although their political and intellectual movements, as well as their gendered experiences, have been in certain respects linked by scholars and activists.7 As I suggest here, the medieval nonbinary-sexed figure from Marvels of the East, along with other similar images, invoke simultaneously the potential of intersex and transgender histories without necessarily conflating them.
Marvels of the East was one of many premodern texts concerned with the “monstrous races”—mythical humanoid creatures with extraordinary anatomies and customs, imagined by Europeans to live in Africa, Asia, or at the very eastern edges of the earth.8 Myths about the monstrous races were widespread in ancient and medieval sources: they appear in well-known works by Pliny the Elder, Augustine of Hippo, and Isidore of Seville, as well as in Mandeville’s Travels, The Book of Monsters, and, of course, Marvels of the East.9 Monstrous-race literature was escapist entertainment for European audiences; as historians have noted, however, such literature conveyed serious information too, sorting sexual practices into the proper and improper, and dividing bodily traits into the human and nonhuman. As the scholar Dana M. Oswald observes, in such texts, the “gendered bodies of the monstrous both disrupt and reaffirm the social hierarchy: that is, monsters reveal and enforce the standards for appropriate human appearance and behavior. They demonstrate the boundaries beyond which humans should not proceed.”10 Although Marvels of the East graciously names at least some of its subjects “men,” its emphasis on monstrosity and human-animal hybridity undercuts any certainty that its subjects are truly human. By including nonbinary-sexed characters among the monstrous races—a motley crew of (at best) dubiously human beings—Marvels of the East indicated that sex and gender variance had important roles to play in the definitional limits of humanity.
Marvels of the East explained that in the “East,” there existed a society in which all members were “hermaphrodites.” These individuals switched between male and female roles in generation, playing the “father” in one instance and the “mother” in another. The individuals’ unusual anatomies facilitated this behavior: “Hermaphrodites are so called because both sexes appear in them. . . . These, having a male right breast and a female left breast, in sexual intercourse sire and bear children in turn.”11 Other writings too suggested that members of this nonbinary monstrous race switched back and forth between male and female social roles; each had “a right breast like a man for performing work, and a left breast like a woman for nourishing children,” as the seventh-/eighth-century Anglo-Latin Book of Monsters (Liber monstrorum) pointed out.12 Such details highlighted the supposedly cyclical nature of monstrous nonbinary activities: these individuals labored as men at work, and they labored as women at child rearing. Other texts too repeated the myth of the monstrous nonbinary race, sometimes illustrating it with a bilaterally split figure much like the one we see in Marvels of the East. A later English source, the famous Hereford World Map (ca. first decade of the fourteenth century), for instance, includes a bifurcated male/female figure, alongside the claim that the individual represented “a race of both sexes, unnatural in many of their customs.”13 Another illumination of the monstrous races in the English Westminster Abbey Bestiary (ca. 1270–1280) features yet another bifurcated nonbinary figure, this one holding a sword in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.14 Such symbols signaled the divergent behaviors of the figure’s two halves: the masculine side clutches a weapon while the feminine side prefers a tool of domesticity.15 These figures’ gendered pursuits, along with the presence of physical markers such as breasts or genitals, made visible the body’s dueling allegiances to two ostensibly opposed sexes.
Scholars have discussed medieval nonbinary images within a number of historical contexts, including histories of intersex, disability, and queer sexuality—all important approaches that have enriched our understanding of them.16 As I suggest here, looking at such figures through the additional lens of “transgender” offers yet further insights. “Transgender” is a term of recent origin, linked to twentieth- and twenty-first-century understandings of sex and gender, and rooted in subjective experiences of self-identification.17 We might therefore think it anachronistic to include medieval phenomena within a history of “transgender,” both because the period entailed very different notions of sex and gender, and because we have little access to medieval individuals’ self-ascribed identifications, which, in any case, would hardly conform to our own modern definitions and categories. Moreover, the Marvels of the East’s nonbinary-sexed figure, with a hyperbolic bifurcated body, did not reflect the morphology of any “real” individuals living in the medieval world, and hence we might find the image an especially problematic example of sex and gender variance in historical context.18
Scholars have indeed been reticent about extending the category of trans-gender, in particular, to gender-crossing figures from the distant past.19 Projecting our modern identities backwards in time, as these scholars rightly note, could divest past gender practice of what made it meaningful in its own time and place, imposing a monolithic category on people who were just as variable and uncategorizable in the past as are those in our own present time.20 Jack Halberstam has argued that “rather than taking knowledge from our current context and using it as a template for the past, we must recognize how much we do not know about gender variability now and use that as a tool for withholding the imposition of knowledge onto vastly different cases from the past.”21
Some scholars have suggested that we allow “transgender” to operate as an open-ended analytic for viewing categories rather than as a rigid label that we project backwards onto specific historical characters.22 Following this approach, we can dismiss arguments about whether or not nonbinary-sexed members of the monstrous races were “really” transgender and instead consider how they illuminated medieval categories of sex and gender, as well as how those categories intersected with other kinds of difference. Because medieval authors described monstrous-race nonbinary figures as switching from “male” to “female” (and back again), we might reasonably conclude that they enacted “transgender” or “transgender-like” transitions, even if our modern terms are, as the art historian Robert Mills has suggested, “necessarily partial and provisional.”23 The gendered inversions in monstrous-race texts thus provide us with a lens through which to view medieval systems of maleness and femaleness, as well as to observe how such texts raised questions about the logic of such binaries. That is, however much they adhered to stereotyped notions of masculinity and femininity, monstrous-race non-binary figures also raised the possibility of different modes of gender that might exist elsewhere, perhaps in the “East.”
It is for this reason that dual-sexed figures such as the one pictured in Marvels of the East were, by most medieval accounts, “monsters.” The word for “monster,” monstrum, was sometimes thought to derive from the Latin word monstrare, meaning “to show.”24 Medieval audiences often understood “monster” to signal that God “showed” divine messages to humanity through the creation of such creatures.25 I suggest that, in the case of monstrous non-binary figures, such images also “showed” audiences what it meant to be male or female. They moreover warned against any confusion of categories that could prompt a loss of human status. The nonbinary image in Marvels of the East, like those in other similar monstrous-race texts, “showed” that men and women were incommensurate sexes, divided not only by a somatic but also by a behavioral line (represented visually by a vertical bisection of the body). In such discourse, men were defined by their aptitude for “masculine” tasks and women for “feminine” ones, despite the existence of many other medieval texts that praised at least certain gender-inverting characteristics, whether among maternalistic male abbots or virile female “viragos,” who were nevertheless accepted as indubitable men or women.26 In monstrous-race literature, in contrast, confusing the boundary between male and female was a clear indicator of monstrosity, so much so that a whole range of monsters tapped into the theme of nonbinary sex to make clear their departure from the natural.27 Asa Mittman and Susan Kim, for instance, view the headless blemmyes of Marvels of the East as confounding any male-female genital dichotomies. Donestres, another Marvels monster, were known more for their cannibalism than for any gendered transgression, but they too were multiply sexed, as Ama...
