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The Monstrous Clitoris: two stories about gender and sexuality in colonial Latin America

I wanted to write about Middle Class values and feminism. Mostly, about how much we have internalized Middle Class aspirations as a desired feminist goal (i.e. Career women, equality in a capitalist framework, etc.). I swear, this was going to be the subject of this week’s post. But instead, I got seriously sidetracked while trying to frame the construction of Middle Class ideas in the Global South, more specifically (because, yes, the Global South is an enormous socio-geographical demarcation), South American constructions of Middle Class, which do have quite a lot in common with Western definitions of Middle Class, particularly with the advent of global capitalism and transnational corporate structures.

Instead, I got trapped by “the monstrous clitoris”! Unlike its sister, the Vagina Dentata, the “monstrous clitoris” will not swallow you and eat you alive. Oh no, this mythical beast will stand erect, defiant of your heterocissexism and related normative ideas, staring at your Patriarchy and threatening your colonial hegemony. These “monstrous clitoris”, and the people who possessed them, were so frightening that they required extensive analysis, medical expertise and even the intervention of Courts. So, instead of discussing contemporary Middle Class values, I’ll tell you the stories of two people who defied convention in colonial Latin America: Juana Aguilar, at the time referred to by media as “Long Juana” and Martina Parra. Aguilar, in particular, presents a unique challenge: we have never heard zir voice. All we know about ze are court transcripts and media depictions of zir life, in what can very well be compared to contemporary tabloid press (imagine telling someone’s story, 200+ years after the fact, based solely on material taken from The Daily Mail or The New York Post). Still, I think these stories, as distorted as they might have come to us, are worth telling because they are foundational and each of them are a point of inflection in the history of Latin America’s sexualities and, to an extent, the history of racialized ideas of sex and gender. We know nothing about these people’s races, ethnicities or, in the case of Aguilar, preferred pronouns*, but we do know a lot about the scandals that ensued during their lifetimes.

Martha Few, in “That Monster of Nature”: Gender, Sexuality, and the Medicalization of a “Hermaphrodite” in Late Colonial Guatemala, gives a good introduction to the case of Juana Aguilar:

In Guatemala City in 1803, the criminal court began prosecuting Juana Aguilar for the crime of double concubinage with men and women. As the court pursued the case against Aguilar, whose sexual ambiguity quickly came to the fore, the judge referred the matter to the court of the Royal Protomedicato, the bureaucracy that regulated medical and health issues in the colonies. The Protomedicato requested that the physician Narciso Esparragosa examine Juana Aguilar, called by the court “a suspected hermaphrodite,” and present his findings.

I’ll spare you the anatomical descriptions (they can be found in some detail in Few’s paper and, for those who speak Spanish, they are available in the Court transcripts of Aguilar’s case). However, here’s what transpired after Esparragosa’s exams: Aguilar possessed what was dubbed, at the time, a Monstrous Clitoris. So threatening to the established order was this organ that Aguilar had to stand trial for the charge of “double concubinage”. Because, of course, Aguilar was double dangerous for having sex with both men and women. Also, Aguilar dressed, alternatively, with male and female clothes, making ze even MORE dangerous (if that was at all possible). Esparragosa was eager to spell out the social implications and dangers that an enlarged clitoris posed: sodomy and masturbation.

As Martha Few notes in her paper:

The policing of sodomy increased after the Council of Trent reforms (1545–63), when the policing of sexuality became an especially important part of Catholic ideology in colonial Latin America and elsewhere.

And here I’d like to contextualize what exactly the policing of sexuality meant in Colonial Latin America, by way of Pete Sigal’s “Infamous Desire. Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America” (also quoted by Daniel Giraldo in his paper “Intermediate Sexualities in Hispano-American Colonial Press”, in Spanish, link to PDF):

When the Spaniards and Portuguese wrote about the conquest of Latin America, they used many descriptions to denigrate the indigenous populations. Probably the three most common and, to Europeans, most extraordinary images in these chronicles of the conquest were human sacrifice, cannibalism, and sodomy.

And oh how did Esparragosa add to the racist stereotypes during Aguilar’s trial! In his report, he took the perpetuation of racism one step further, by comparing Aguilar’s body to those of “Egyptian women” and other women from “Nations of the East” (which, at the time, referred to African women), thus associating the “Monstrous Clitoris” with “Monstrous Races”, and setting precedent for hundreds of years of institutionalized racism in Latin America, lasting even until today.

Esparragosa wrote in his report for the Court:

The excess size [of the clitoris] has contributed much to the reprehensible abuse that some women have committed to capriciously sate their lasciviousness, cheating men of that which nature has granted them.

Here’s where I would insert a LOLClit saying “I’M IN UR PATRIARCHY CHALLENGING UR HETEROCISSEXISM”, because that’s what was at the bottom of Aguilar’s trial, the idea that monstrous female bodies and body parts could lead to transgressive female sexual behaviors and, of course, the established notion of who gets to have an active role in sexuality and in society (SPOILER ALERT: It’s cis men).

Esparragosa does not spare us the dehumanizing details of his “efforts”. In his final report, he carefully explains how he tried to “arouse” the organ in question; how he tried repeatedly, even with the help of midwives and other professionals. Probing, rubbing, manipulating, always with the end goal of proving that this clitoris could be used as an all mighty penis! Always seeking to determine if Aguilar was actually a threat to a penis. The exams which, from the court transcripts, I infer humiliating, painful, invasive and disrespectful concluded that Aguilar was not a “hermaphrodite” as the Court had sought to prove, but instead, ze was defined by the Medical establishment as “neither man, nor woman” and due to that, incapable of the crimes ze was accused of. We know nothing more of Juana Aguilar, except that ze was the first documented case, in mass media, of the trials of a person based exclusively on their gender. Additionally, Aguilar’s case gave way to the first public record of “Sex-Ed” in colonial Latin America. Newspapers at the time, in their eagerness to sensationalize the case further, included graphic depictions of female genitalia for the first time (in a transparent effort to further “Other” Aguilar and the supposed deviation from the norm).

 

2.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, it was also in 1803 that Martina Parra was called to Court, suspected of being a “hermaphrodite” and of having lived an impure life with Juana Maria Martines. In fact, the original charge by the alcalde of Zipaquira was that of having engaged in unisexual relations with another woman and, subsequently and rather contradictorily, for being considered a “hermaphrodite” (a crime in and by itself during colonial times). It all started with, what else? Gossip.

Zipaquira was a small town in what now constitutes Colombia, at the time the Spanish colony known as the New Kingdom of Granada. According to, once again, Court transcripts and newspaper reports (some links in Spanish, in which case translations are mine unless stated otherwise), Juana Maria Martines and Martina Parra had been friends for quite some time. When Juana Maria became a widow, their friendship intensified and they spent a lot more time together. Martines told the Magistrate that one day they went to collect wood and because of the heat, they laid down by the side of the road to take a nap, they drank an alcoholic drink and due to the mixture of heat and drowsiness, Martines felt Parra’s hands under her skirt and “they sinned”. And nothing was the same between them from that day on. They moved in together and became lovers. Eventually, the neighbors started to suspect the relationship between these women and a formal complaint made its way to Court.

And here is where things get bad for Martina Parra. In an attempt to defend herself in front of the Court, Juana stated that they couldn’t have committed the sin of “unisexual copulation” because Parra had a hidden penis that became “alive” when it was “time to sin” (yes, the excessive use of the word sin is part of the reports and certainly not mine). When the Court heard of this “hidden penis”, a scandal ensued. Parra no longer stood accused of “leading an impure life”, she was now accused of hermaphroditism. This accusation carried a terrible consequence as she was no longer allowed to testify in her defense. Instead, the Magistrate said, her body would serve as her testimony.

Writing about Parra, Renée Soulodre-La France, offers an interesting interpretation of the judicial proceedings and the real motives behind them:

Regarding Martina Parra, the corregidor viewed the case in early 19th century Nueva Granada as worthy of the attention of the audiencia and subsequently sent Parra to the viceregal capital to be dealt with by the more sophisticated judicial and medical apparatus than that which was available in his rustic community. There is an underlying current of collusion in the statement the corregidor sent to the chancellor of the audiencia, a willingness to become part of an exclusive club of modern, learned men, by offering this token of study. Thus, the baroque or irregular, the unfit, if we are speaking of an ordered world, the unusual, these were considered worthy of curiosity and study.

The body of a woman used to advance the status and social standing of a man in a position of power. Gosh, 1803 you say? I would have thought this happened just yesterday.

The medical exams, once again, invasive, humiliating, with the threat of the Monstrous Clitoris lurking in the experts’ report (emphasis mine):

On 20 of December the escribano receptor of the audiencia went to the Carcel de Divorcio, where Martina was being kept in isolation, to protect the other women from her potential desires. He was accompanied by the two medical experts who subjected her to a physical examination. These two were the maestro don Miguel Ysla and don Honorato Vila, both doctors and they undertook the examination after taking the accustomed oaths. Their report indicated that they had carefully examined Martina Parra, who was suspected of having the sexual organs of the male sex as well as the female sex and they both concluded that she only had the characteristics that belonged to a woman, with all of their natural perfection, and location as far as they could tell from their observation and tactile examination. They claimed that she had no sign whatsoever of the sexual organs of a male although they did mention that the clitoris could acquire length and become harder depending on age and concupiscence, as described by surgeons and authors of books of anatomy. However, they suggested, there was no evidence of this type of ‘abuse’ on Martina’s body, although they could not state this absolutely since her clitoris was naturally hidden and only showed when engaged in the carnal act.

The doctors in Bogotá were conclusive. Martina Parra was a woman, in every way. Given this development in the case, the fiscal ordered that she be set free, and conveyed that order to the director of the prison. However, he also ordered that Martina Parra be interrogated to try to get to the bottom of this case. When she was asked if she was a man or a woman, she responded emphatically that she was a woman. She categorically denied any sexual relationship with Martines, and claimed that contrary to what Martines had testified, they had never shared a room. She also stated that she would have preferred to sleep with sheep rather than share a bed with Martines. The judges insisted trying to determine what might have been the motivation for Martines’ charges of hermaphroditism. She could not say, except that she had gone to the alcalde to instigate a process against Martines to claim a debt of 5 pesos that she was owed. Immediately after that, she was arrested on the charges of unisexual relations. The case was terminated on 22 of January when Parra was exonerated, the attorney stating that given the results of the physical examination, there was no reason to pursue further charges. However the judges were not willing to simply let this go. Juana Maria Martines had taken up the court’s valuable time and had to be punished for her frivolous behavior. They charged her with false testimony and to discourage any potential copycats they sentenced her to two months imprisonment. They couldn’t punish one woman, but that didn’t stop them from punishing the other.

 

* In the absence of Aguilar’s testimony about preferred pronouns and given the fact that ze dressed with male and female clothes, I have chosen to refer to ze with gender neutral pronouns, however, there is no record anywhere of Aguilar’s preferred self identification.

5 Comments

  1. Lex HT wrote:

    “both doctors and they undertook the examination after taking the accustomed oaths.”
    ‘accustomed oaths’ implies that this sort of examination is common. So the oath is that they’re not going to get turned on by it, or something?

    The whole is so badly creepy.

    Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 6:17 am | Permalink
  2. It IS creepy and I’ve came across so many other cases that I realized it was also tragically common. I picked these two people because both of their stories focused on similar issues, though the outcomes were very different. There is another one, though, that probably deserves not just a post but a book of it’s own: the life of the “Lieutenant Nun”, Catalina de Erauso, the first (and I believe only) recorded AFAB Conquistador. Erauso managed to get a special dispensation from the Pope, after numerous killings in battle (where ze proved zir “manhood” to the authorities), to actually wear male clothes and live as a man. Erauso’s story is notably absent from mainstream history books, but how a person managed to navigate during those times across gender and military is very interesting. It helped that Erauso came from an extremely privileged family of Conquistadores and colonizers, but still, a pioneering story nonetheless.

    Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 6:42 am | Permalink
  3. ozymandias wrote:

    Flavia, your post is fascinating. As a genderqueer person, I am fascinated to learn about our foreparents– and angered at the oppression that we have suffered.

    Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 12:12 pm | Permalink
  4. strato wrote:

    @Flavia:

    Thanks for the post…

    La monja alférez! There is actually a book about her by Thomas de Quincey (which I haven’t read yet).

    Another, more recent case, that might interest you:
    http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_Pla_Meseguer
    A book about this Teresa Pla is quite a success in Spain now.

    Saturday, October 1, 2011 at 5:13 pm | Permalink
  5. April Q. wrote:

    @ Flavia

    Thanks for this post! I just wanted to mention that I actually was assigned the memoir of the “Lieutenant Nun” for an introductory level “History of the Americas” course that focused on the English and Spanish empires. I go to a Canadian university (on the west coast).

    Yay, progress (in teaching history) is being made!

    Monday, October 3, 2011 at 3:00 am | Permalink