Struggles for identity. Social representations, medical discourses and judicial practices before sexual ambiguity (Spain, 16th-17th Centuries)

Abstract

During the 16th and 17th centuries, a series of extraordinary cases that involved suspicions of hermaphroditism, sex changes, cross-dressing, and sex-same relationships altered the everyday life of some Spanish cities and towns. While some of them came to courts, others were recorded in letters, chronicles and treatises of the period by virtue of their “curiosity”. On the basis of analysis of individual trajectories of the protagonists, the performance of the judges who participated in such cases and medical discourses which focused on the phenomena of sexual ambiguity, this paper explores the tensions and contradictions between sex, gender and sexuality in the attempt to define a discrete identity in contexts of sexual uncertainty.