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In keeping with the widespread fascination with monsters and natural wonders in the early modern period, a number of literary and medical texts produced at the turn of the sixteenth century were eager to look at the body of the hermaphrodite. Even across a great span of time, this curiosity is contagious, and there has been a substantial amount of scholarship on the early modern hermaphrodite in a range of fields.1 The primary literature is both rich and diverse-hermaphrodites figure in medical texts, legal cases, monster books, philosophical transactions, poems, plays, pamphlets, essays, and so on-and these texts have been accorded a particular interpretive power in our readings of a society whose stage fictions were personated by cross-dressed actors and whose female monarch insisted that she had the "heart and stomach of a King."2 Heretofore, scholars have primarily been interested in the ways in which the anomalous body of the hermaphrodite unsettles structures of sexual differentiation and thus throws contemporary attitudes toward gender and sexuality into relief.3 This scholarly conversation in the history of science and gender studies has led literary critics to read certain "hermaphroditical" poems and plays-texts that thematize transvestism or cross-gendered behavior-alongside medical texts about the hermaphrodite, presenting both kinds of texts as part of the same social discourse of sexuality and the body.4 In this regard, stories about the hermaphrodite have come to feel very familiar to us. However, although this critical attention has greatly increased our understanding of the production of gender in the early modern period, the figure of the hermaphrodite still remains blurred to our eyes, its contours indistinct. This is because the discourses that construct the hermaphrodite are themselves incoherent. The hermaphrodite often emerges from these texts as a figure that exceeds representation.5 It is on this problem of representation that this essay will focus. I will disentangle the medical and literary texts that we now so often read side by side in order to discover how to "look at" the body of an early modern hermaphrodite, while also considering where the desire to look comes from in the first place.
It is my contention that the ocular curiosity surrounding hermaphrodites in the early modern period (as well as today) is generated by the very texts in...