Referencia completa: Vázquez García, Francisco y Cleminson, Richard: “Subjectivities in transition: gender and sexual identities in cases of ‘sex change’ and ‘hermaphroditism’ in Spain, c. 1500-1800”, History of Science, 48 (2010) (CAMBRIDGE, GBR), pp. 1-38

This article assesses how critical boundaries around concepts of what made men and women were constructed in changing social, diagnostic, medical and ‘gendered’ circumstances in Spain from the early sixteenth century through to the late 1700s. In order to illustrate this process, we draw on a number of cases of ‘doubtful’ sexual identity exemplified by instances of ‘transvestism’, ‘transgenderism’ and ‘hermaphroditism’ over the period 1500 to 1800. Recent work has analysed cases of ‘doubtful’ sexual identity in Spain but has not provided a systematic overview of their implications with respect to broader European understandings of sex differences, subjectivity and agency. Furthermore, no Spanish study has traced the decline of one of the principal figures in such liminal cases, the ‘hermaphrodite’ or person that changes sex, a shift which took place during the seventeenth century in Spain and in other European countries. By 1700, it was  believed in most scientific and legal circles that hermaphrodites could not procreate, that women could not in reality change into men and, as a less likely scenario, that men could not change into women; true hermaphroditism was deemed incapable of existence.

El artículo puede descargarse en la web de academia.edu de Francisco Vázquez García, pinchando en este enlace.