Watching my son grow into a young man has been lovely to see, to watch his confidence grow in his own body. He loves to hike long distances across mountains. His strength is increasing, his voice deepening. But I didn’t expect to feel envious watching him become a man—to notice how different his experience of puberty is to my own, or what my sister and other friends experienced as teens. He has a growing confidence, strength; I had a sustained decline into self-consciousness and anxiety—of a body that might now bleed unexpectedly, that made me vulnerable and brought unwanted attention, a body that can never measure up to what a woman’s body is supposed to look like according to every glossy media image.
I try to not resent my body for the most part, but I’m usually unsuccessful in affording it grace. I’ve never been tall. I’ve never been athletic, much to my sports-loving mom’s chagrin. I have never been exactly what one would ever think to call graceful. I still fall when I cross-country ski. And of course, being a woman, a body is a tricky thing to come to terms with. You learn that a body is something that can draw attention in ways that are both overt and subtle, demanding a hum of constant vigilance mixed with anxiety mixed with annoyance, fear, and rage.
A wish for mind over matter could in theory be equalizing—everyone’s mind is and should be treated equally—but instead, it only makes the lines of our bodies more distinct when we or others notice them. The illusion is dispelled when bodies don’t follow the standards of life that have been set by white cis-men.
Bodies have to be noticed when one has to talk about their sexuality, their pregnancy, their nonbinary identity, or their disability. Or that one’s skin color differs from another. It’s an unwanted reminder to a white male status quo that our minds are not in control, that we live in bodies that can be different, fluid, undefinable, uncontrolled. Mortal.
From as far back as Greek philosophy extending into early Christianity, the perfect human was considered to be an androgyne. Empedocles, as well as Plato’s Symposium, relays that Zeus cleaved the first early humans—double-bodied and androgynous—into distinct male and female forms. Leah DeVun, in The Shape of Sex, writes:
Scholars have suggested that the Platonic androgyne story drew from a widespread mythology of primal gender that also appeared in Zorastrian, Sidonian, and other ancient traditions, and which imagined masculo-feminine entities that could self-procreate.1
Gnostic texts also considered god to be a union of both male and female elements, speaking both voices. DeVun goes on to write that:
the idea of the primal androgyne continued to exercise a certain influence far into the medieval era: in fact, a counter tradition of texts and images persisted from earliest Christianity to the thirteenth century that idealized androgyny and envisioned a masculo-feminine Adam.2
Androgyny had once been considered as the perfect, original state of humanity before the fall—and even those who did not believe necessarily in a primal androgyne still praised the idea of unity over division.
This tradition considers that the first humans were neither corporeal or separate—more akin to angels, who were also thought to be androgynous. Milton writes of such angel androgyny in Paradise Lost:3
For spirits when they please
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not tied or manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose
Dilated or condens’d, bright or obscure,
Can execute their aerie purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfil.
But by the early modern era, the now familiar binary divisions of the world came into sharp relief. Androgyny became monstrous—equated with hermaphroditism:
Division was, by this argument, superior to primal singularity, and androgyny’s sense of angelic transcendence was lost. Nonbinary sex disappeared from the narrative of biblical creation to uphold the dyadic relationship between man and woman, spirit and body, church and adherent.4
And this is why bodies have been policed and controlled, enslaved and exploited, despite the diversity and nonbinary identities that have always been a part of the human story. Patriarchy is fundamentally about hierarchy, about adherents who observe the rules of god (i.e., the church), the rule of kings, the rule of husbands and fathers in the home. When one of these pillars is loosed, the entire enterprise of hierarchy and power-over is threatened, exposed as not traditional, natural, or inherent.
Maps in the early modern era would often include depictions of different races and bodies beyond the borders of lands—men with dog’s heads, ‘blemmyes’ with faces on their chests and no head to be seen, and “androgyni” or “hermaphrodites.” These myths were also repeated by writers who formed theological and philosophical traditions, such as Augustine of Hippo and Isidore of Seville. Such ‘monstrous’ bodies made appearances in bestiaries, travel diaries, and maps.
These bodies on the edge of the known lands were doing more than simply decoration. As DeVun writes:
Descriptions of monsters were no doubt entertaining, but they also performed the serious work of defining what Europeans viewed as civilized cultural practices and establishing antipathy toward bodies and desires at odds with a European Christian ideal…encyclopedic sources used the hermaphroditic race’s imagined bodily and behavioral differences to draw boundaries between spatial, species, religious, and racial categories.5
And yet, the depiction of other bodies also presented the idea of these other bodies as possibilities that exist—also posing the imaginative possibility of escaping social strictures.
In alchemy, the ideal of the hermaphrodite was the key to finding the philosopher’s stone—that an androgynous person, having the wisdom of both masculine and feminine in one body can cross the divide and be borderless, so can the merging of matter into gold. The alchemists believed that the idea of a nonbinary sex not only crossed physical boundaries, but also temporal—returning to an idyllic past and a unified future:
Authors argued that nonbinary-sexed figures traversed, or even dissolved, the boundary between human and nonhuman, earth and heaven, time and timelessness…As medieval thinkers imagined, nonbinary sex was a return to the old, a hastening of the new, an affirmation of the mortal, and a path to the divine. The concept of nonbinary sex had the potential to break apart the linear march of time and unleash something expansive, something at the very source of life: an existence that was both earthly and everlasting.6
Alchemy and the occult flourished in the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century. As did maps and empire, colonization and exploitation. And it’s not surprising to find that themes of ‘monstrous’ bodies and gender arise in the literature and plays that also flourished at the time, with the more ready access to public theater and the printing press.
This morning the Guardian had a story about the play Galatea by John Lyly being produced in London. It’s a play from Shakespeare’s time—around 1588. In fact, Lyly’s themes and stories influenced many of Shakespeare’s plays. Many of Lyly’s plays involve plots of cross-dressing and cross-gender, as would Shakespeare’s plays.
But Lyly and Shakespeare weren’t the only ones to involve cross-dressed star-crossed lovers and themes in their works at this time. Phillip Sidney’s Arcadia, John Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas, Nathan Field’s Amends for Ladies, Middleton and Dekker’s Westward Hoe and The Roaring Girl, or Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, among several others, all have extensive plots of cross-dressing men and women. And then there's the possibility that Shakespeare was cross-dressing in life. As Jean E. Howard writes:
The theatre as a social institution signified change. It blurred the boundaries between degrees and genders by having men of low estate wear the clothes of noblemen and of women, and by having one’s money, not one’s blood or title, decide how high and how well one sat, or whether, indeed, one stood.7
The flourishing of the theater, with these cross-dressing and cross-class juxtapositions, was happening at a time when the first female English monarch of consequence8 was on the throne. Gender roles were upended for the state, and for the church with Elizabeth as its head. Plays and pamphlets of the era, proliferating for the first time with mass printing, are rife with themes of cross-dressing, and specifically, of women dressing as men. While the theater explored these ideas with comedy and tragedy, celebration but also derision, it was also fraught as young men played the roles of women on stage. The theater, the writers, and these themes had to be stopped.
Puritan polemicists railed with concern that clothing could actually alter gender, that cross-dressing had “the power to alter and unman the male body itself.” Thomas Beard, whose work Theatre of God’s Ivdgements was printed three times, wrote that men who wore “the habits and ornaments of women,” became “lascivious and effeminate…monstrous…dishonest and ignominous.”
Pamphlets like Hic Mulier—or The Man Woman—were misogynist rants against women who dared to be in public dressed in men’s clothes, a somewhat fashionable thing for many women to do at the time. Women could also now go to the theater, be out in public (gasp!) and were not as confined to the home with a rising middle class. As Malcom Gaskill writes of this time:
For a generation or more, men had feared women swapping places with men, flipping nature on its head.9
Or, as the author of Hic Mulier put a fine point on it:
If this [crossdressing] bee not barbarous, make the rude Scithian, the untamed Moore, the naked Indian, or the wilde Irish, Lords and Rulers of well governed Cities.10
In a time of gender and class instability coupled with empire, colonization, and exploitation, it’s not surprising that one of the first things that King James did when he became king of England was to re-publish and circulate his tract on demonology and reignite the widespread persecution of witchcraft. Women who acted like men—who spoke out in public, who held property without a husband or father or son, who spoke in anger against their husband or neighbor, or was beyond child-bearing years (i.e., not acting like a woman)—were the ones most often accused of being a witch.
An article I read recently, despite my weariness of AI articles, asked whether or not AI could ever truly be intelligent or sentient without a body. I found myself thinking about it long after reading it. Because of course, a body is what it means to be truly human, animal, of this earth. When we neglect our bodies, we neglect others, we ignore others, we ignore other living bodies, we ignore the places we live, we ignore the earth. It is of course an inevitable irony that the creators of this new Frankenstein’s monster are skewed entirely to young cis-white men—a bias that has long been a part of the systems that are established in this world, despite the many who have called out this bias in AI with alarm. Another instance of cis-white men building a new god in their image—without a body to get in the way.
As Emily Dickinson wrote, I am afraid to own a body…
DeVun, Leah. 2021. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. Columbia University Press. p. 20
Ibid. p. 25
quoted in Weinberger, Eliot. 2020. Angels & Saints. New Directions Books. p. 24-15
DeVun, Leah. p. 31
Ibid. pp. 40-1
Ibid. pp. 198-9
Howard, Jean E. 1988. “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4. pp. 418-440.
with all apologies to Queen Jane Grey and Queen Mary, and even almost-Queen Matilda and Queen Eleanor and…but I digress…
Gaskill, Malcolm. 2021. The Ruin of all Witches: Life and Death in the New World. Penguin Books. p. 137
Quoted in Howard, Jean E. p. 425
I resonate with so much of this. Having a body is both a privilege and a burden, with so many archaic narratives placed upon us. Also, I love DeVun’s work! Thank you for doing all of this amazing research!
The Dickinson reference rings hard truth for me - a non-white, non-first world female who has lived in a patriarchal structure which controls everything about my existence. I have been told what I should wear, how I should sit crossing my leg, how I should walk, and what colors ‘suit’ my skin tone. I will not even get started on my reproductive rights, it’s an whole another rabbit hole.
The introduction makes me cry, yes I saw my brothers growing into confident young men and I drifted far into my own abyss of experiences because they were so different from them. The isolation of growing into a woman is real - the insecurity, discomfort, unreliability of the feminine body is almost overwhelming when confronted with. It took me years to recognise that sensitivity, soft curdling angst to express and my raw hormonal outbursts are also my power. I guess strength looks different for everyone, for some (specially masculine) it is imposing acceptance, and some (mostly feminine) it is silent reckoning.
Thank you for this wonderful post Freya, I am archiving this in my favourites 💜