Pedagogies of Survival: Teaching Trauma in Traumatizing Times

“Here begynnyth a schort tretys and a comfortabyl 

for synful wrecchys, wherin

thei may have gret solas and comfort”

The Book of Margery Kempe

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Compassion and Comfort

I ask only that we feel together for a time. I cannot tell you to imitate my method. I cannot tell you to imitate my feelings. I cannot fix this, these traumas new and old. I ask only that you listen for a time to my feelings and you feel your feelings alongside mine. If something I feel resonates with you, perhaps the sympathies will better us and strengthen us. I blush to say that our compassions, our feeling-together, may comfort us. By comfort I mean that fortification that being-together can give to those it connects. Comfort embiggens us so that we might together face the traumas which might crush us alone. Somehow, the comfort of feeling-together makes us a one that is more than two, yet bigger than one alone. I seek comfort that I might offer comfort, something I do not have on my own. I ask that we feel together because the feelings come without my asking, because I cannot ignore or avoid the feelings and so they must be faced. The seminar must go on, students and teachers must go on. Yet, how do we do this, yet remember as Edutopia does, "When Students Are Traumatized, Teachers Are Too." Many of us need more than a "pedagogy of trauma" but also "a pedagogy of survival" that will not only instruct our students but assist in a collective reclamation of life, power, and self.

This past week has been a representative embodiment of much of the work I struggle with this semester and other times in my work as a scholar, mother, and activist. This past week I have been tasked to teach trauma in a traumatic time to traumatized students. I take one this task as someone who has also struggled with trauma. How do I teach a seminar, "Beyond Male and Female: Histories of Transgender and Non-Binary Gender," discussing how bodies are stolen, imprisoned in mental hospitals, subjected to abusive conversion therapy, and pressed towards suicide in Dylan Scholinski's memoir, The Last Time I Wore a Dress? Can you possibly engage pain that students in the class not only understand but have experienced, and still feel? How do I teach my seminar, "Racism and Human Diversity: Medieval Narratives of Blackness," discussing how the trauma of slavery meets the horror of sexism in the stealing of bodies in Beloved by subjugation, rape, and torture? If each lesson plan has an arc, a beginning, middle, and end, where is it that I can bring my students? Certainly we do not live in a world without the ghosts and illness of white supremacy, racism, sexism, and their thieveries. And the text does not offer any such wholesale escape or escapism. There is liberation, there is hope, there is exorcism, but the scars and pain remains. I cannot tell the students how to fix trauma, where they might run to flee racism, how they might undo the knots of sexism and rape. I can offer them what teachers (including Dylan Scholinski and Toni Morrison) have taught me: how to survive, how to leave, and how to reclaim what has been taken, broken, killed. Yet this requires us to feel where and when we are, to feel where we and others have been, to feel together and find some strength which we might call comfort.

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Trigger Warnings

My students are tired, so tired, and the trauma we must discuss and share is triggering of wounds that have not scabbed. The rape, suicide, torture, death, and abuse of racism, gender, and disability that our texts ask us to feel-with is so heavy and our students are already carrying so much. The hope is that, even if the texts cannot lighten our loads, at least they can give strength through a shared affect and struggle. Yet these connects are hard and demand what Morrison calls a thick sort of love. These are connections that happen at the point of wounds and scars. When students ask to leave the room, I commend their self-preservation and self-care. When they return, I am grateful for their compassion. These are the skills that students have learned to survive trauma. These are good skills. These are lessons we need to share and on which we are trying to build. Comfort may help us survive but it is no guarantee. Some of us may break under the strain. These are the stakes of our learning about trauma and survival, these are the costs, and these are our hopes. Some view "trigger warnings" as extraneous to teaching, even antithetical to teaching because it seems to offer our students an "out" from dealing with difficult learning. I don't see warnings that way. I see the warning a part of the lesson. I see the warning as part of thinking about trauma. I see the warning as part of survival. I see the lesson as part of this survival. This is the lesson Denver learns in Beloved: if one can leave, sometimes one must leave. Students do not leave class because they are experiencing the lesson on trauma any less but because they are experiencing the trauma and the lesson that much more.

A dilemma in teaching about trauma is that trauma rarely exists within a discreet period of time or along a linear temporal frame. Trauma is less like a line than an organic vine with recursive bends back toward the points of unresolved hurt, away from points of pain, and run all through with a twisting anxiety. As instructors, we teach our students to be ever conscious about context, and so we must also be. This is another way that "trigger warnings" may serve as more than a deterrent or excuse. Trigger warnings is a way of acknowledging that traumas we have experienced may not be over simply because we have been able to show up to class. This week, as we discuss the KKK, slavery, the persistence of racism and its damage, white supremacists are once again marching. This week, as we discuss transphobia, the systematic isolation and exclusion of transgender, and the despair unto death felt by trans and other non-binary persons, the federal government works to take away job protections for non-cisgender persons. This week, as we discuss rape and the abuse of women, the same federal government makes it harder for such women (all women) to reclaim agency over their bodies and sexualities. This week, as we discuss violence and the hate that will not die, a mass shooting kills several dozens and harms countless. Do we offer our students escape and refuge? Or do we offer them a place to rally and resist? What if some students desperately need the former and other students are eager for the latter? What if we, the instructors, are feeling crushed under the weight our times? Our times can be poignant reminders of the lingering significance of texts and histories that may be decades or centuries old. Our times can also leave us speechless, unable to think or argue because we feel so much. Some lessons are meant to transport us somewhere, lead us to some conclusion. Some lessons are meant to help us sit exactly where we are, when we are, and help us to exist and survive together. Sometimes, a lesson is successful not because of what students walked away with but because students (and ourselves) were able to walk away.

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The Lessons that Don't Happen

This sum of trauma may be that the best lesson plan is sometimes the lesson that does not happen. There is power is being able to consider the people in the room, consider the time and context of the room, to consider the instructor in the room, and then change the lesson. What are some of these changes? What lessons emerge when we let go of the classes that won't happen? (Lesson 1) Students have more power than they may know. I have had classes where I've worked to help my students understand trauma in a text. Other times students understand this trauma uneasily well and the lesson becomes learning with them how to survive. Showing our students that we can change, change our directions, change our locations, change our plans, is a way of teaching them the lesson that things don't have to be this way. We have the power to adapt, evolve, respond to our environments. By listening to the students in the room, we teach (or remind) them about their own power. (Lesson 2) Remind students its okay to think with their feelings. At the start of my seminars, I tell my students that nearly all my classes teach the same three lessons but in importantly distinct forms, embodiments, and contexts: how to perceive power dynamics, how to affect/effect power, and how to wrestle with the ethics of power. Understanding that emotions are key to how social power functions and is manipulated, and affective well being is essential to ethical considerations, is a lesson students do not get enough. By acknowledging the struggle of working through pain and fear as well as the ethical role of compassion and comfort, we place our student's experiences in the center of a class, not somehow outside them at an impossible objective and amoral distance. (Lesson 3) The classroom is not the only place where learning and growth can happen. Again, sometimes the best lesson is the lesson not given, when we teach our students about the power to turn a class day into a mental health day: to get sleep, to take a long lunch, to lighten a crushing work load, to find comfort in their own way. As Edutopia succinctly writes, "Brains in Pain Cannot Learn." This may feel like giving up, giving students the day off, but in our humility we are reminding students of their own power to survive, enact self-care, and learn. 

In the end, a pedagogy of survival is not a lesson plan I can set in advance or summarize for those looking to imitate it. Trauma is like a cancer, a form of life that grows and changes. Likewise, survival requires adaptability and transformation in response to classroom environments and the lives that populate them. The lesson is to be able to let go of our lesson plans when our students and circumstances change. This does not mean that there are no ways forward. There are many ways forward. Which ways is best for you and your students greatly depends on who you are, where you are, when you are teaching, and what we all bring to the classroom. On each of my seminars, I ended the last class of the week by compiling lists of ways in which we can reclaim our power, our lives, and survive. We drew from their experiences and the text's offerings. Among the list was the comfort of writing, the comfort of reading, the comfort of sharing one's feelings with another. In its own way, this is a function or hope of www.ThingsTransform.com. This is a corner of the internet where we may share a corner of our minds and hearts. For that, I thank you. Thank you for feeling-together with me for a time. I do not know what it is you felt but knowing you are there gives me some comfort. Sitting alongside my self, I am not sure what lesson I walk away with, but I am grateful that tonight I can walk away from my work, leave it here, and go engage with the things that transform me.

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Losing Home: the Rape of Transgender Lives in Exile & Pride

"My body became an empty house, one to which I seldom returned. I lived in exile"

Exile and Pride
Eli Clare

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The Place of the Hermit

Growing up in Port Orford, Oregon, near Route 101, Eli Clare felt at home with the land but alienated from the society that defined the place and those who lived there. A coastal town, it is located near Siskiyou National Forest that provided logging jobs for Clare's family and many in the area. As he walked home along a road following the Elk River, Clare would watch logs gloat down the waters and fisherman dipping in their lines. These walks through the woods or up mountains were among the moments where Clare felt most at home in the place where he was being raised. Yet among the community of the logging town, the young transgender youth often felt like an outsider. "I watched and listened to the girls in my school talk about boys, go behind the equipment shed to kiss them, later in algebra class about fucking them," recounts Clare of his school days, describing his emotions as like a metaphorical wall between himself and the the girls of the town, "I watched from the other side of a stone wall, a wall that was part self-preservation, part bones and blood aloneness, part impossible assumptions I could not shape my body around" (124). Although he lived in the same forests as his schoolmates, he was unable to feel welcome in the space because of the cisgender and heterosexual norms of girlhood that organized the lives in the town. Clare puts these feelings into metaphors drawn from around him. Walls, especially made of stone, were all around him. They defined the physical place. Yet it was his  social place, being raised as a girl, and his work to relate to his body and his environments in ways that his body resisted. As a result, he felt alone and without a place in Port Orford. 

The effect of these stone walls was to turn this small Oregon town into a kind of machine that produced and housed proper cisgender heterosexual girls. Despite feeling alienated in his social environment, Clare recounts trying to survive in the town by allowing himself, to degrees, to submit to its production of straight feminine girls. "I pull out an old photo of myself from the night of my high school graduation," Clare recalls looking at on old album of his childhood home, "I wear a white dress, flowers embroidered on the front panel, the plainest, simplest dress my mother would let me buy. I look painfully uncomfortable, as if I have no idea what to do with my body, hands clasped awkwardly behind me, shoulders caved inward, immobilized, almost fearful beneath my smile. I am in clumsy, unconsenting drag. This is one of the last times I wore a dress" (136). While the physical space of Oregon make no special demands of femininity on Clare, the place he lives is defined by such rules imposed on bodies it marks are female. Once described as a wall, the physical and metaphorical boundaries that Port Orford places on Clare's body become as close to him as an flowery dress. The wall metaphor placed Clare on the outside but the dress makes him feel alienated from his surroundings within an encircling embroidered garment. Inside the linen walls that wrap him in girlhood, Clare feels like a foreigner in his own body. Often transgender experiences are compared to drag. Usually this is a conflation of a trans person's post-transitioned inability to pass and a Drag performer's intentional performative gender that emphasizes its own points of failure to create a sense of shock. Yet Clare turns this around and suggests that the transgender person does not point to the artificiality and failure of their gender after transition but before transition, to reveal the socially constructed walls placed around them.

Being put in the place of a girl, Clare began to feel his body was taken away from him. Port Orford did not feel like a home to him and in time neither did his body. "I do understand how certain clothes make me feel inside my body," explains Clare (135). Certain clothes marked Clare as automated as a girl, as though Clare was not resident, at home, or in control of his body. Meanwhile, other clothes marked his body as in his control, free to move and dress as he will; but these were the clothes marked for men. "For me, Vogue and Glamour held none of the appeal that Walt Maya did, dressed in his checkered shirt, cowboy boots, and wide-brimmed hat," explains Clare (136). "I joined the boys in their emulation. I knew early on the feel of boots and denim, knew I would never learn to walk in a skirt." Just as Clare could watch girls from the other side of a figurative wall, so too he could watch boys from the other side of a  paneled dress. He was trapped in the place, the physical clothing and the cultural associations of girls while he watched boys living the life he wanted on the other side of a gender divide. Had the strict cisgender mechanisms that produced girls and boys had more lubrication, allowed for parts to move more freely, then perhaps Clare could have had an easier time moving from one social position to another. As it is, he experienced a lot of friction as he tried to transition and became marked as a failed girl rather than as a trans man. "I tried to wear skirts my mother sewed for me... I failed," admits Clare. "I loved my work boots and overalls long after the other girls had discovered pantyhose and mini-skirts. But failing left a hole in my heart; I wanted to belong somewhere." (124). Rather than be allowed to move from one place, one gender designation, to another, he became marked as defective and felt as though he lost his body, his home, and his place in the world

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Losing Home

Stating that gender and sexism is in the environment can bring subtle aspects to the forefront, such as clothing, but this does not discount personal agents in the ecology of household that persons in their place (or disrupting a place's sense of comfort) can directly and violently control a life. Indeed, in naming what gave Clare the deepest feeling of "losing home," he names the rape and sexual abuse he received from his father. "I could start with the ways my body has been stolen from me," writes Clare. "Start slowly, reluctantly, with my parents. My father who raised me, his eldest daughter, as an almost son. My father who started raping me so young I can't remember when he first forced his penis into me." (125). In the grim details of his father's rape of his body, Clare marks a point in which the loss of a sense of home moved from a distant wall, to intimate apparel, and through the threshold of his body as his father violently penetrated him. The father who gave him a place to live, and room to explore his masculinity, chose instead the most direct and penetrative way to vacate Clare's power from his body. In each way, the rape demonstrates itself as an assertion of ownership and power. "I could start with the brutal, intimate details of my father's thievery, of his hands clamping around my neck, tearing into me, claiming my body as his own" (128). However he allowed Clare to wander towards masculinity in his public presentation, in privacy he put Clare in the place of a girl; a girlhood defined by sexual violence and submission. To be put in the place of a girl, in the Clare house, was to have one's body taken.

Although the theft of his body is direct and personal, Clare nonetheless views the rape as a part of the wider environments sexist system of taking control over bodies. In these details, Clare fears the mechanisms of such power can be forgotten. "I lose the bigger picture," worries Clare, "forget that woven through and around the private and intimate is always the public and political" (128). By examining the rape not as isolated incidents of an unusually violent man, Clare opens up his story to wider questions of gender and sexuality. "How did my father's violence, his brutal taking of me over and over again, help shape and damage my body, my sexuality, my gender identity?" asks Clare (126). This process worries him because such discourses around the relation between rape and queer gender or sexuality usually take the perfunctory form of cause and effect. "Will my words be used against me, twisted to bolster the belief that sexual abuse causes homosexuality, contorted to provide evidence that transgressive gender identity is linked directly  to neglect?" (125).  Rape is taken as the cause of a girl fleeing femininity to live as a man or else to be sexually engaged with only women. This conclusion however depends on an arrangement of the facts only in a particular flow of causation. This is the "twisting" that Clare fears. Such a twisting begins by assuming cisgender and heterosexuality is the natural starting position and transgender and queerness as the artificial, rather than normative manhood and girlhood as one the the chief products of such highly gendered structures of power. Indeed, this irony is evidence by the contradicting supposition of cause and effect. Non-normative gender and sexuality is supposed to come from too much (even violent) impositions of gender, concluding it as a kind of failure or overcompensation. Yet transgender and queerness is also supposed to come from neglect, as though they are the natural state that has not been properly imposed out of the life by such over-acting parents.

Yet by allowing such questions, asserting there is a relation between sexist environments and rape, Clare can ask other questions as well. "How did his non-abusive treatment of me as an almost son interact with the ways in which his fists and penis and knives told me in no uncertain terms that I was a girl?" (126). Opening up the conversation, Clare is able to turn the tables on sexist assumptions about queerness and rape. Rather than assume that rape causes non-normative genders and sexualities, Clare asks the necessary question if rape is intended to form or fix straight men and women. The masculine behavior came before and around the rape, it was during the rape that Clare was put in a humbled female position. By admitting these questions, Clare points to the lack of easy answers and thus the evident lack of stable genders in the environment where he lived. "How did his gendered abuse - and in this culture vaginal rape is certainly gendered - reinforce my sense of not being a girl?" adds Clare. "How did watching him sexually abuse other children - both boys and girls - complicate what I knew of being a girl, being a boy?" (126). Rape is a performance and an act which speaks of power dynamics in the environment. Fort Orford was not simple a place for cisgender heterosexual boys and girls, nor simply the place where they were made into normative men and women, but a place where gender was always already unstable and unraveling. The need to put Clare in the place of a girl, emphasized how he was not at home in that place. Taking away Clare's power revealed that he had power to take. Likewise, it teaches the lessons that straight, cisgender male supremacy needs to take power from others in order to maintain its dominance. It needs to police the borders of gender because those who live in the space are not naturally bound by the sexist social laws of place and position. 

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The World of the Exile

"I wanted to be a hermit," declares Clare on recalling his overall feeling during his childhood, "to live alone with my stones and trees, neither boy nor a girl." (124). For all the difficulty that his physical body and environment posed for him, it is his social body and environment that made him feel alienated and not at home in either. The matter of his body remained relatively the same but their meaning for him was continually being defined for him by his father and the patriarchy. "My father raped me for many reasons," analyzes Clare, "and inside his acts of violence I learned about what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy as well" (129). The woodlands and the flesh are spaces where many different sort of lives could have been explored by Clare but in the toxic social environment of Port Orford life was continually being put in its place. Indeed, Clare lived a life full of of contradiction, as both boy and girl, but overall was the command that whatever or whoever he is that he learns his place under the power of men. In the end, the rape did not assert for Clare was not the stability of masculinity or femininity, heterosexuality or homosexuality, but the lack of stability and security in his body and his home. "I lived by splitting body from mind, body from consciousness, body from physical sensation, body from emotion," writes Clare (131). "My body became an empty house, one to which I seldom returned. I lived in exile." In the end, the gender dysphoria Clare felt, the alienation from his body, in some ways points to the violence and instability of gender in the place where he grew. To be clear, it is not Clare's masculinity or attraction to women that came from this toxic environment but rather the suffering that walled off his transition to these places and yet also painfully made sure he never felt at home in femininity or attraction to men. The suffering did not put him in the place of a man or a girl but took from him the power to feel at home in any place. It made him an exile. 

If the imposition of walls, coverings, and bindings are the tools that cause the loss of a sense of place, what then are such exiles and hermits left to imagine the world? Upon considering the lessons of force and repression, Clare decides that putting up such blocks in the discourse of his own body and environment will likewise fail to describe his experiences. Clare writes, "this strategy of denial, rejecting any possibility of connection between abuse and gender identity, abused and sexuality, slams a door on the messy reality of how our bodies are stolen" (125). Theft does not mean the annihilation of the valued objects, be they bodies, land, or power. Rather the loss of home is a rearrangement and cordoning off of objects in the space. Certain bodies are not allowed to interact with other bodies, such as women sexually with other women or trans men with boots and overalls. Instead, they become jealously guarded by certain bodies from other bodies, such as the violent force of such men to claim sexual access to these young girls or to the right to wear such masculine trappings in public. The logic of claiming or stealing a place is not about creating or destroying lives but about controlling them. "We live in a time of epidemic child abuse, in a world where sexual and physical violence against children isn't only a personal tragedy and symptom of power run amok," concludes Clare, "but also a form of social control"(128-129). Putting up walls, around land, a community, a person, or a story, does not fundamentally change what is being contained or excluded, rather it attempts to control them by making them submit to personal possession. Such a possessor sets the manner and possibility of how people and the world relate to one another. For Clare's father, it seemed less important whether Clare was a boy or a girl, but rather that he could determine when he could claim himself as a boy and when Clare's father could violently claim him as his girl.

There is nothing in the woods or the water that make Port Orford a place for straight cisgender girls and men, but not queer transgender youth. Nor is it simply that things, like social progress, move slower there by nature. Often when such places are shrugged off by urban queers or defended by locals as obviously conservative, what is meant is that these are places where violent male supremacy, the isolation of gay men and lesbians, and the hatred of trans persons dominate. Such places exist because they are occupied territories and the people living there are subject to patriarchal control. The rejection from female community and the occupation of Clare's body by his father evidence how these places are defined by such power dynamics. "What a better way to maintain a power structure," asks Clare, "than to drill the lessons of who is dominant and who is subordinate into the bodies of children." (129). Such overt acts of violence may or may not rare, Clare was subject and witness to many of them, but the lessons of them serve more than personal ends. Rape or the fear of rape, exclusion or the fear of exclusion, are one of the chief weapons that keep men and women, boys and girls in their place in Port Orford. Those who step out of line become targets for abuse. "And here is the answer to my fear: Child abuse is not the cause of but rather a response to - among other things - transgressive gender identity and/or sexuality" (129). Clare lived as a boy before he was put in the place of a girl by his mother's dresses or his father's rape. His transgressive gender and sexuality did not come from abuse. Although Clare admits, "I feel safer, somewhat buffered from men's violence against women, walking the streets after dark, knowing my night time outline and stride are frequently read as male." (127). Rather, for young Clare, the abuse came in response to his gender transgression. The abuse may have come regardless. Walls are not only put up for those who would climb over them but to make a statement not to try. This is how any why hatred inscribes itself in the environment and the bodies of a place like Port Orford.

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More on Eli Clare:

"Reclaiming Home: the Pilgrimage of Transgender in Exile and Pride"

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Scars of the Pardoner: A History of Castration (2/5)

"Transsexuals... become castrati, 
extol this operation as a liberation"

Piotr O. Scholz
Eunuchs and Castrati

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“The trans-historical focus of most works on castration,” notes Matthew Kuefler, “reminds us that eunuchs in medieval European society had a history stretching back much further than the beginning of the Middle Ages.”[i] The same goes for the modern transsexual, I argue. A genealogy of surgery can be traced via the scar tissue of castrates with an archeological record of skin from a doctor’s office in 21st century America, through medieval Europe and beyond, demonstrating that the violence of laying hands on another is not accidental in the evolution of surgery but congenital to its cultural work.[ii] Since Classical medicine, surgery has operated by coding certain bodies as “the parts” (that which is discarded), while coding others as “the whole” (that which is preserved).[iii] A progressive history of a body is made by eliminating the prior for the sake of the later. In the case of castration, testicles, and sometimes phalluses, were cut off in what began as a cure for illness or wounds but became a way of controlling spiritual and temporal life.[iv]

Before spread of castrates throughout Europe in the form of eunuchs and castrati, the act of castrating a servant to produce specific changes, e.g. making him sterile or keeping his voice from dropping, was an operation that cut across cultural boundaries. Adopting by Byzantium from the Greco-Romance, when various Muslim states claimed the region, the practice of utilizing eunuch servants were adopted and spread throughout conquests in Asia and Eastern Europe.[v] The job of enslaving and surgically producing eunuch servants, however, largely fell to Christians, particularly monasteries, who collected, castrated, and sold eunuchs.[vi] The work of these operations on and through these slaves moved around the Mediterranean encouraging the spread not only physical surgery but social practices aimed to erase old sexual, national, and religious identities.[vii]

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“The English word eunuch derives from the ancient Greek,” writes Gary Taylor in his Abbreviated History of Castration, from a compound of words “meaning ‘bed,’ especially ‘marriage bed’” and “to hold, keep, guard.”[viii] Thus, giving the name eunuch, meaning “guardian of the marriage bed,” to castrates inscribed their liminal sexual position between the supposed purification of the body at castration and the persistence of a post-op body full of potential for alternative sexual lives.[ix] At the heart of social application of the eunuch was the portioning the body at castration that sterilized bodies to make the reproduction of its genetic line into the future unlikely. Their futurity cut off, eunuchs became physical and social stand-ins for lords when they were absence from the manor. While losing the power to reproduce, eunuchs could often still have erections, making them ideal sex slaves for the wives of powerful lords: able to satisfy lust without threatening the line of succession. The eunuchs services depended on his continued possession of a sex and sexuality that is nonetheless socially erased.

Because he could not create his own line of heirs and was thus dissuaded from attempting to amass large stores of personal wealth, the eunuch was considered a safe trustee for the Lord’s possessions, managing servants, the estate, armies and Churches.[x] The castrate was used not only to police gender politics between wife and husband, but this liminal position made the castrate at once the mechanism of cultural erasure and the keeper of the socially divided parts of the community. Administrators of the Latin Church soon discovered the castrate’s instrumental social value in managing sex and temporal politics. By the late middle ages, as high voiced castrati were being integrated into choirs of Rome, the castrate had come to represent a body several times denied, lingering only as unseen singers and prayers to serve the futurity and salvation of others.

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While by the 14th century, eunuchs and castrati were still not an active part of the historical record of England, other operations and castrate bodies were being produced through a more punitive extension of the expulsion logic of castration and surgery. As in neighboring regions, e.g. France and Germany, England adopted castration as punishment for legal and spiritual transgressions of sex, such as in the castration of Peter Abelard for his erotic relationship with a nun, Eloise.[xi] Because older laws dictated that rape, infidelity, or sodomy could be punishable by death, the alternative of castration was seen as a merciful development.[xii] While laws punishing sexual crimes across Europe varied, but punishments frequently returned to the tropes of dismemberment and death by scarring, burning, and castration.[xiii] In each of these cases, we see progressive logic of surgery being developed in medieval England, cutting up parts of the body supposedly to save the physical and spiritual wholeness of society.

While medical doctors enacted the physical violence, Doctors of the Church, such as Peter Abelard, were instrumental in making castrates into tools for spiritual operations. While Abelard’s castration followed closer to the line of being “made that way by men,” her drew on Mathew 19:12 to encourage chastity, where penitents literally or figuratively “make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven.”[xiv] Since the medieval period, interpretations of this passage find a renunciation of one’s body, sexual identity, and past for the sake of purifying closure, erasing the sexual abilities of the castrate. Thus, despite continued erotic correspondence with Louise, Abelard wrote that castration freed him to pursue a heavenly eternity unencumbered by demands to think temporally about gender and sexuality.[xv] The violence on Abelard cut deep, internalizing a sense of division and making him an advocate for the development of more such operations.

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By the late Middle Ages, medical, legal, and spiritual surgeries were inextricable, working in congress under “Christus Medicus” (Christ as Physician) or “oure soules leche” as the Pardoner names Him.[xvi] Drawing on the cures and teachings of Jesus, such as Mathew 18:9, “if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away,” and Matthew 19:12, this doctrine could be used to excuse Christians to lay hands on another if the violence could be justified as promoting the spiritual health of a person or society.[xvii] “The opinion of ancient science that castration,” Mathew Kuefler notes, “could cure or at least alleviate ailments also made its way into medieval science.” Despite religious prohibitions against deforming the integrity of a body, castration, was “permissible mutilation if used to save the whole person.”[xviii] With the castrate as a sign of a purged past, society could excuse a wide array of violent operations including producing eunuchs in monasteries, purging Byzantium and the Holy Land, and castrating prisoners.[xix] 

A brief history such as this is insufficient to account for the tiniest part of the lives captured in the social operation of sharp machines, but can at least testify that in the scars of castrates we find a genealogy implications not only on the development of sex change operations but a wide array of physical and social partitioning of bodies across time. Beyond eunuchs and castrati, castration has developed into the surgical and chemical sterilization of racial minorities and people with disabilities.[xx] The reconstruction of genitals continues to police gender through circumcision, genital mutilation, and operations on intersex children.[xxi] Punitive surgery has served as precedent for later legal and social violence, “corrective” rape, and the internalized shame that prompts suicide.[xxii] A critical trans history of the scars of castration cannot be limited to the castrate but all those bodies on and through whom the violence of sharp machines operates. 

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Part 1: A Physician's Tale
Part 3: The Trans-Operative
Part 4: The Physician's Surgery
Part 5: The Pardoner's Scars
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[i] Matthew S Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism in the Middle Ages.” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Vern L Bullough and James A Brundage ed. N. Y.: Routledge, 2000. 280. 

[ii] “Emasculated men, usually described incorrectly as eunuchs, can now be found among transvestites, transsexuals, and other members of various sects … Some who consider themselves transsexuals in the West, although they have actually become castrati, extol this operation as a liberation.” Piotr O. Scholz. Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History. John A Broadwin and Shelley L Frisch trans. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999. 3, 234. 

[iii] Taylor, Gary. Castration: an Abbreviated History of Western Manhood. New York: Routledge, 2000. 56. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 286. Also cited in Tracy, Larissa. “A History of Calamities: the Culture of Castration.” Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages.5. 

[iv] Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 5-18; Matthew S Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 286. 

[v] Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati,198. Tougher, Shaun. The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society. N.Y.: Routledge, 2008. 60-65, 119. 

[vi] The castration of eunuchs was a production that was often forbidden and often ignored, with producers and slave-traders, often buying their eunuchs from foreign sources. See: Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati,198-199. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 284-290. 

[vii] Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 203-214, 232. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 280; Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 60-67, 119. 

[viii] Taylor, Gary. Castration, 33; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 6. Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 232. 

[ix] Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 4-11. Taylor, Castration, 33-36; Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 282-285. 

[x] Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 54-82. Taylor, Castration, 32-39. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 282-292. Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 4-9. Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 200-209. 

[xi] Peter Abelard’s castration has been the topic of numerous articles and chapters. Irvine, Martin. “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and Remasculinization.” 87-106; Wheeler, Bonnie. “Origenary Fantasies: Abelard’s Castration and Confession.” 107-128; Ferroul, Yves. “Abelard’s Blissful Castration.” 129-150. Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler ed. N.Y.: Gardland Publishing, Inc., 2000; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 9-19; Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 11; Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 246-255; Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 289-290. 

[xii] Numerous scholars discuss both the use and resistance to the punitive use of castration in European law: Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 287-289; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 19-28; Irvine, “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body,” 96-99; Bremmer Jr, Rolf H. “The Children He Never Had; the Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law.” Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. 108-130; Taylor, Gary. Castration,52-55. 

[xiii] Johansson, Warren and William A Percy, “Homosexuality. ” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. 168-175; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 19-24; Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 286-290. 

[xiv] Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 160-164. Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 282-286. Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 12-13. 

[xv] Irvine, “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body,” 87-106; Wheeler, “Origenary Fantasies,” 107-128; Ferroul, “Abelard’s Blissful Castration,” 129-150; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 9-19; Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 11; Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 246-255; Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 289-290. 

[xvi] oure soules leche” Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 916. For more on Christ as Physician see: Arvesmann, Rudolph. “The Concept of ‘Christus Medicus’ in St Augustine.” Traditio. Vol. 10. N.Y.: Fordham University, 1954. 1-28. 

[xvii] Matthew Taylor, Castration, 72; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 9-10; Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 282-283; Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 68-82; Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati,159-164. 

[xviii] Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 286. Also cited in Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 5. 

[xix] Castration and violent operations tended to work in junction and reflect a wide variety of social contests over bodies, property, and beliefs, while rarely gaining the status of becoming a standard response. As Tracy notes, “The desire to use castration as a way of stamping out foes undermines notions of inherited right and suggest a deeper instability within power structures. Like torture, castration is a weapon employed by the weak: those hose hold on power is tenuous or questionable,” Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 19-24. See also: Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 119-127; Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 198-234. 

[xx] For more on the sterilization of racialized and disabled persons see: Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder. Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Chesterton, G. K. Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument against the Scientifically Organized State. Ed. Michael W. Perry. Seattle: Inkling, 2000. Print. Lewis, C. S. "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment." God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970. 287-300. Print. 

[xxi] Numerous debates on circumcision continued throughout the middle ages and after, as noted by Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 184. Intersex surgery on hermaphrodite/intersex children were in regular use, they were conceptually folded in as “eunuchs from birth” and continue today: see, Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 31-32; Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 286; Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 5-13; Chase, Cheryl “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism,” The Transgender Studies Reader, 300-314; Winkerson, Abby L. “Normate Sex and Its Discontents.” Sex and Disability. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow ed. London: Duke, 2012. 183-207. 

[xxii] See Raymond, Janice. “Sappho by Surgery: the Transsexually Constructed Lesbian-Feminist.” The Transgender Studies Reader. 134; Winkerson, “Normate Sex and Its Discontents,” 183-207.

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