Defiant Bodies: Discourses on Intersex, 1573-2003

In sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, intersex people are often portrayed as the products of “monstrous births,” birth malformations which were interpreted as moral omens, portents of evil, or signs from God.  Deformed tissue, incompletely separated twins, disorders of sexual development, or irregularly shaped children, which we would now in many cases attribute to genetic or chromosomal causes, all fell under the umbrella of “monstrousness.” Often, a determination of monstrousness meant that the bodies of intersex people were judged as evidence of moral corruption present within a family or community. These two books, one by the surgeon Ambroise Pare and the other by the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, feature some of the same or similar early woodcut illustrations of intersex people, demonstrating how early modern fascinations with monstrousness crossed disciplinary lines, showing up in materials about medicine, botany, animals, natural philosophy, and more.