Marta Vicente

This article studies the narratives produced by the seventeenth-century Spanish soldier Antonio de Erauso, and the eighteenth-century French diplomat the Chevalière d’Eon, to illustrate changing notions of gender and nature in early modern Europe. Knowledge of gender was knowledge of nature and the process of acquiring knowledge, of seeing and knowing, of classifying and organizing, began with the naming and telling. In human nature, the challenge came when the person being observed offered contradictory gender clues or when the gender contradicted the anatomy of the bearer as male or female. While contemporaries of Erauso seemed to accept the contradictory nature of Erauso as a female and heroic military man, the story of the Chevalière d’Eon, forced to dress in clothes appropriate to her female gender, exemplifies the eighteenth-century pursuit of representing nature in realistic terms and the insistence in properly naming bodies that could be classified as male or female.

This article addresses current discussions over identity in both transgender and Catalan independence narratives, two types of narratives that have rarely been studied together. Trans people and those who favor Catalan independence have oftentimes expressed their identities as being political bodies that seek recognition as autonomous political entities. These political entities, however, are born out of the contradiction between the physicality of the body and the land and the subjectivity of emotions. The construction of one's self, be it a human body or a nation, is something "felt," an emotional realm that translates into the space of the human or geographical bodies. Seeing body and nation as physical as well as emotional takes us to the study of Catalan identities as fluid, and flexible, with multiple sides and angles, depending not only on historical context but also diverse geographical and emotional settings. By bringing trans to independence narratives we gain a new perspective on notions of identity as they apply to discussions over national sovereignty. It allows us to explore issues of identities as a multifaceted process, resulting from the tension between the essence that emanates from the body, the land, the culture, and the need for social and political recognition.

This article seeks to start a discussion that may help us understand why the category "transgender," created to include all trans* experiences, has excluded some. If "transgender" cannot fully include all trans* people, can it still be a useful category to adequately capture and analyze the lived experience of historical actors? It is in tracing back the genealogy of transgender, in the search for a name that could encompass the multiple and sometimes contradictory relationships between one's body and its social recognition, that we may attempt to discover why transgender has eclipsed terms such as transsexual and transvestite. The article first examines the parallels between recent debates in the historiographies of gender and transgender as terms that can express the complex social representation of bodies negotiated by language. Second, it studies how much a genealogy of transgender in the past reveals in fact a multiplicity of terms to express a realignment between body and a self that can be read by society. Ultimately, the author proposes the study of first-person narratives as the best way to comprehend the multiple terms used to express the diverse and sometimes contradictory identities an individual can embody.

This article explores the history of what the German-American endocrinologist Harry Benjamin labeled in 1966, "the transsexual phenomenon." By mid-century, a growing number of individuals in both Europe and America were approaching physicians such as Benjamin searching for answers and means to change their bodies to match their gender. This phenomenon had started in Europe in the 1930s, when the Danish painter Einar Wegener underwent a series of operations that transformed a body defined at birth as male into the female body of Lili Elbe. The news of Elbe's transformation ignited interest and discussion among physicians as well as the public on the capacity science had to alter bodies to fit their intended selves. The case of Elbe combines the three main aspects studied in this article-the medicalization of the homosexual, the birth of the transsexual, and the physician-patient relationship in transsexual narratives. The study of physician and patient narratives allow us to see how the transsexual phenomenon was in fact created out of the intersection of interests from both physicians and their transsexual patients.

The article proposes to rethink the landscape of the early modern archive of the Iberian world from a queer perspective. It addresses recent trends that explore the possibilities that rethinking queerness, in particular in relation to the archive, has for reconsidering the trajectory of historical analysis. It argues that the structure of the archive has sometimes obscured the ambiguous sex and gender of some individuals in the early modern Iberian world.

Eighteenth-century debates continue to set the terms of modern day discussions on how 'nature and nurture' shape sex and gender. Current dialogues - from the tension between 'real' and 'ideal' bodies, to how nature and society shape sexual difference - date back to the early modern period. Debating Sex and Gender is an innovative study of the creation of a two-sex model of human sexuality based on different genitalia within Spain, reflecting the enlightened quest to promote social reproduction and stability. Drawing on primary sources such as medical treatises and legal literature, Vicente traces the lives of individuals whose ambiguous sex and gender made them examples for physicians, legislators and educators for how nature, family upbringing, education, and the social environment shaped an individual's sex. This book brings together insights from the histories of sexuality, medicine and the law to shed new light on this timely and important field of study.

L accés als articles a text complet inclosos a RACO és gratuït, però els actes de reproducció, distribució, comunicació pública o transformació total o parcial estan subjectes a les condicions d ús de cada revista i poden requerir el consentiment exprés i escrit dels ...

The present article analyzes the crucial impact that artisan forms of organizing work had in the production of early cotton factories. By examining the case of the Sirés factory in Barcelona, this article argues that dividing work by gender and age and working with relatives, all traditional practices in an artisan shop, allowed eighteenth-century factory owners to face the challenges that production posed. The example of the Sirés factory also offers a picture of early industrialization that challenges the long-standing argument that artisan and factory forms of production were antagonistic. Factory owners organized their production and work in ways that replicated the way artisans had long produced and worked in their shops. Moreover, in shops and factories alike, production depended not just on the work of individuals, but also on that of their relatives. Parents and children, husbands and wives – all brought the flexibility of traditional artisan forms of organizing work to the ...

Die Autorin analysiert den entscheidenden Einfluss, den die Form, in der Handwerker ihre Arbeit in den frühen Baumwollfabriken organisierten, auf die Produktion der frühen Baumwollfabriken hatte. Die Untersuchung des Falls der Sirés-Fabrik in Barcelona zeigt, dass die Einteilung der Arbeit nach Geschlecht und Alter und das Arbeiten mit Verwandten den Besitzern der Fabriken im achtzehnten Jahrhundert ermöglichte, den Herausforderungen zu begegnen, welche die Produktion stellte. Das Beispiel der Sirés-Fabrik bietet ebenso ein Bild früher Industrialisierung, das die seit langem bestehende Behauptung, dass Handwerk und Fabrikformen der Produktion unvereinbar seien, anficht. Fabrikbesitzer organisierten ihre Produktion und die Arbeit in einer Weise, welche die Art, in der Handwerker in ihren Werkstätten lange produziert und gearbeitet hatten, nachahmte. Darüber hinaus war die Produktion, in Werkstätten wie Fabriken, nicht nur von der Arbeit einzelner abhängig, sondern auch von der ihrer ...

In January 1786, the Spanish Inquisition accused the Mexican theologian and bibliographer José Mariano de Beristain of purchasing, possessing, and reading aloud the French pornographic novel Le Portier des Chartreux (The Porter of the Charter House). Flouting his vows, the clergyman invited men and women to his bedroom, read them the novel, and showed its illustrations. Beristain's story offers us a rare glimpse into readership practices and the transmission of ideas in the eighteenth-century Spanish world. Le Portier was not only pornographic, it also had a philosophical and political message. According to current scholarship such philosophical and political components instilled radical ideas in readers. Beristain's story, however, shows that instead of absorbing the intended messages, readers were either scandalized or simply took pleasure in the pornographic elements of the story. Their understanding of Le Portier thus challenges the idea that “politically motivated pornography” directly affected public opinion in the late eighteenth century.