My research into castrati singers of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries presents a particular challenge vis-à-vis the recovery
of past bodies; specifically, the challenge revolves around the difficulty
of rendering the castrato body intelligible within present-day conceptions
of sexual difference. Frequently historical accounts
of castrati focus on their ostensible deformation of a given biological norm;
I argue, however, that the accounts themselves, in situating past bodies
within a present historical context, impose a certain deformation upon the
castrati as well.
The first historical records of castrati—males castrated
before puberty in order to preserve their high singing voices—appear near
the end of the sixteenth century, when several are listed as performers in
the private chapels of the Italian nobility. By the
seventeenth century, castrati were a commonplace in church choirs throughout
Italy, and with the advent of opera a number of castrati became international
singing stars. By the end of the eighteenth century,
however, the popularity of castrati had declined drastically. The last operatic castrati retired during the early decades
of the nineteenth century, and thenceforth castrati were found only in the
choirs of a few Italian churches; the last known castrato, Allesandro Moreschi,
retired from the Sistine Chapel choir in 1918.
My research suggests that the decline in popularity
of castrati coincides with a gradual shift in the conception of sexual difference
during the eighteenth century. Until this shift, Western
conceptions of sex borrowed heavily from a classical tradition inherited
largely through the works of Aristotle and the Roman physician Galen. In his book Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur calls this ancient
conception of sexual difference a “one-sex” model, which defined sex as a
vital energy that animated both male and female bodies. As
the more perfect sex, men possessed a greater degree of this energy, a fact
used to justify masculine privilege. Crucially, however,
the difference between men and women was perceived as a difference in the
quantity, not the quality, of this sexual energy; men could lose a degree
of this energy and fall into effeminacy, while women could experience an
increase of this energy and become masculinized.
In my view, castrati acted as living representations
of the “one-sex” model. Appearing first within the
choirs of the church, castrati embodied a renunciation of sex that both male
and female subjects could undertake to achieve salvation.
Emerging later as operatic stars, the castrati fulfilled a different
function, embodying an eroticization of sex experienced by men and women
alike; as testimony to this function, I note that castrati not only played
both male and female roles upon the operatic stage, but also exerted an erotic
appeal to both male and female spectators.
According to Laqueur, however, during the eighteenth
century a “two-sex” model of sexual difference gradually replaced the older
“one-sex” model. In this new model, a single sexual
force no longer animates both men and women; rather, men and women are held
to possess radically dissimilar sexual essences. Given
this shift in the conception of sexual difference, castrati could no longer
represent a sexual unity that tied masculine and feminine subjects to one
another. Castrati, in other words, came to be viewed
merely as mutilated men, no longer able to represent masculine subjects and,
despite the radicality of their castration, unable represent feminine subjects
either. Castrati therefore fell from favor as their
former operations proved impossible to undertake within this new regime of
sexual difference.
In seeking to disseminate my research, I have found
that the vocabulary of the “two-sex” model, which still dominates the discourse
of sexual difference in the West, proves inadequate to the task; the conception
of the castrato as an emblem of a sexual energy common to both men and women
seems difficult for contemporary readers of my research to grasp. In my work I have attempted to foreground the distinctions
between past and present imaginings of sexual difference, but have met with
mixed results.
Several years ago, for instance, I presented my research
in an ASTR seminar panel and was frankly dismayed with the comments I received. While uniformly complimentary, all the comments revolved
around ed my engagement with the “gender ambiguity” of the castrati. In my reading of these remarks, the term “ambiguity” bespoke
an urge to establish the sexual identity of the castrati along a continuum
of masculine and feminine gender positions. To be
sure, the very notion of “ambiguity” suggests the indeterminacy of these
position, but the term itself invokes a desire for determinacy; just as children
born with “ambiguous” sexual organs routinely receive surgery to fix their
identities as either clearly masculine or clearly feminine, so the remarks
of the panelists implied that the “ambiguous” identity of the castrati was
likewise open to clarification.
If anything, however, the castrati embodied a polyvalence,
rather than an ambiguity, of sexual positions. The
castrati, in other words, did not inspire a desire to establish their affiliation
with either a masculine or a feminine identity; rather, the appeal of the
castrati lay in their ability simultaneously to represent both masculine and
feminine identity positions.
Of course, the “two-sex” model, like its “one-sex” antecedent, is historically determined and like its antecedent it too will be replaced by another conception of sexual difference. Certainly advances in genomics have begun to reveal degrees of genetic complexity far more profound than the distinction between “X” and “Y” chromosomes. It is therefore conceivable that such advances will effect an overturning of the “two-sex” model in favor of a sexual paradigm in which individual genders are as varied as individual genomes. Today, however, when “Men are from Mars” and “Women are from Venus,” the “two-sex” model still offers a significant challenge to articulating the conception of sexual difference that allowed for the emergence of the castrato singer.