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ABSTRACT
This article explores various early modern figurations of the eunuch as a part of trans history as they featured prominently in the Ottoman court and on the English stage. It specifically focuses on the figure of the black eunuch within the gender and racial economy of the Mediterranean world in which not all eunuchs were marked as the same. The Ottomans maintained and promoted the visibility of eunuchs, and contributed to the proliferation of the eunuch imagery in early modern Europe. The Ottomans also separated eunuchs racially as black and white. In parallel to this separation emerged an essentializing anti-black racism in the Ottoman elites writing that relegated black Africans to the bottom of an established racial hierarchy while marking whiteness as the ideal. These figures further circulated within a racialized hierarchy throughout Europe via chronicles, travelogues, and stories, and eventually appeared on the English stage as well- known oriental theatrical figures. This essay shows that eunuchs of the past not only denaturalize dichotomous gender models and upset phallocentric gender signification, they also illustrate how gender and race are mutually constitutive in the making of normative bodies on a global scale.
Early modern gender roles operated across a wide spectrum rather than being fixed at dichotomous ends. Feminist and queer historiography on women, boys, cross-dressers, androgynes, and hermaphrodites persuasively shows that these figures blurred the binarized gender distinctions often taken for granted by modern readers, and consequently presented early modern bodies as vulnerable and mutable sites of difference.1 Recent research in trans studies similarly challenges modern sexed assignments and heteronormative gender formations, and instead offers a polylith of trans identities in flux.2 These conceptualizations-both early modern and modern-bear a compelling relationship of resemblance and difference. Drawing upon these studies, this essay focuses on the figure of the eunuch and argues that "eunuch" was a distinct gender category in the period-one that productively demonstrates the ways that gender and race were co-constituted. Eunuchs' bodies were re-formed, re-figured, and re-inscribed, and ultimately existed beyond the male-female binary. They were pushed outside many of the boundaries of normativity, and considered "out there," foreign, and monstrous. Eunuchs therefore not only denaturalize dichotomous gender models and upset phallocentric gender signification but also illustrate how gender and race are...