Within scholarship on The Golden Ass, Lucius's time among the devotees of the goddess Cybele (8.24-30) is usually understood as one more picaresque episode that lambasts the depravity of the Roman ...empire, while its galli are rarely seen as more than as mincing punchlines. Here, bringing insights from transgender studies, I argue that when Lucius reports on the galli, he is unknowingly observing an alternative community of trans women rather than cinaedi. Further, a transgender-studies reading of the novel recuperates the galli as developed characters with their own interiority and agency and allows us to see how their transing in Book 8 sheds light on Lucius's bodily and spiritual transformations later in the novel. As both historical figures and characters within the narrative, the galli set a compelling precedent for an ancient trans identity that conceives of the self as authoritative, without recourse to the physical body as a source of truth.
The article is devoted to the study of the history of the mystical sectarianism spread on the territory of the Tobolsk province in the 18
th
— early 20
th
centuries. The main groups of mystical ...sects in the Tobolsk province are revealed. The features of the sects’ doctrine are characterized. The socially dangerous nature of the activities of Eunuchs, causing physical and moral harm to persons involved in the sect, is characterized on specific historical material. The authors come to the conclusion about the relativity of government statistics on the number of sectarians in the region. The nature of the interaction of sectarian communities with the state, as well as the implementation of confessional policy on the territory of the province is presented in the work. Analysis of forensic sources allows us to conclude that the use of severe punishment, including imprisonment, deprivation of all rights of the state and exile to remote areas of the country, largely contributed to the departure of Eunuchs from the practice of castrating their followers, the use of less cruel methods of achieving “bodily purity”. The dynamics of the degree of distribution and the nature of the settlement of sectarians are considered. The research was carried out on the basis of the analysis of the complex of legislative, statistical and record keeping sources of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (Moscow) and the State Archive in Tobolsk.
Eutropius as an oriental Tomasz Babnis
Classica Cracoviensia,
08/2020, Letnik:
23
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Eutropius, eunuch who became the consul of the Roman Empire in 399 AD under Arcadius, is a villain of Claudius Claudian’s invective In Eutropium. Argumentation in this piece is based on many negative ...topoi employed in the earlier Roman poetry. In doing this, the poet makes a particular use of stereotypes connected with the East, by dint of which he can attribute these features to the Eastern Roman Empire (epitomised by Eutropius) and – at the same time – to show that the right Roman virtues are fostered in the Western Roman Empire, controlled by the poet’s patron, Stilicho.
The materials of pre-revolutionary periodicals of Yakutia of the late 19th — early 20th centuries, containing information about the life of sectarian Eunuchs in the region are analyzed in the ...article. The reference to these sources is necessary in order to reconstruct the history of the scavenger in connection with the current interest in modern science in the publications of the regional print press, which were not previously taken into account by the researchers. The novelty of the research lies in the replenishment of knowledge of the history of skopstvo in Yakutia due to the introduction of new historical sources into scientific circulation. An analysis of the materials of the Yakut press allows us to conclude that the role of Eunuchs in the development of arable and truck farming in Yakutia remained an urgent topic years after their release from exile. The authors pay special attention to the coverage of the everyday side of skopic life on the pages of periodicals. The similarity of news stories about sectarians form a stable idea of the relationship of Eunuchs with the local population, lifestyle and models of behavior in the Yakut reality of the late 19th — 20th centuries.
Ben Sira twice cites the eunuch in sayings that play on his sexual impotence. In so doing he diverges from what we know of the Hebraic tradition before him. Blending theory is used to interpret the ...sayings and their apparently malicious intent. After appraising the ambiguous status/identity of the eunuch in terms of 'intersectionality', Ben Sira's attitude is contextualised using the concepts of 'gender liminality' and 'hybridity' and set against the strict binary system that underlies his understanding of gender more generally. It is suggested that Ben Sira's theology of creation, like that of the Wisdom tradition more generally, forms the principal basis for this binary system. At the same time, the more accepting attitude to the eunuch in Isaiah 56 is considered and its notion of the 'new creation'.
•Members of the Eunuch Archive community took the Big Five Personality test online.•We compared Big Five profiles for males that were and were not castrated.•Though not significant, androgen ...deprivation is associated with higher agreeability.•Supplemental estrogen is associated with significantly higher agreeableness in castrated males.•The personality of eunuchs may differ from that of both males and females.
Genetic males may receive androgen deprivation therapy for reasons ranging from sexual reassignment to treating prostate cancer. We investigated the relationship of androgen deprivation to personality for voluntarily castrated males in a large-scale online survey. Based on the historical social positions of androgen-deprived males and contemporary research on testosterone, we predicted that modern day androgen-deprived males (n=122) would differ on several axes of the Big Five factor personality inventory compared to eugonadal controls (n=1229). Though not statistically significant, an increase in agreeability for the androgen-deprived group was observed. The role of estrogen on the personality of castrated males was also explored through androgen-deprived participants taking supplemental estrogen (n=33). Estrogen was found to correlate with significantly higher agreeability scores.
Abstract
Historians agree that the primary source of supply for eunuchs in late imperial China was not the penal system but self-emasculation. What is less known is that the legal institution of ...punitive emasculation and the political institution of court eunuchs were separated long before then. While some scholars argue that emasculation was not among the mutilating punishments that Han Emperor Wen abolished in 167 BCE, there is enough evidence to show that the Han court no longer used it as a regular punishment after his reign and that Wen had indeed done away with emasculation. In fact, it was the non-Chinese Northern Wei dynasty that reintroduced it centuries later, from whence it continued to be used intermittently until the late seventh century.
The perfect servant Ringrose, Kathryn M
2003., 2007, 2004, c2003., 20030101
eBook
The Perfect Servant reevaluates the place of eunuchs in Byzantium. Kathryn Ringrose uses the modern concept of gender as a social construct to identify eunuchs as a distinct gender and to illustrate ...how gender was defined in the Byzantine world. At the same time she explores the changing role of the eunuch in Byzantium from 600 to 1100. Accepted for generations as a legitimate and functional part of Byzantine civilization, eunuchs were prominent in both the imperial court and the church. They were distinctive in physical appearance, dress, and manner and were considered uniquely suited for important roles in Byzantine life. Transcending conventional notions of male and female, eunuchs lived outside of normal patterns of procreation and inheritance and were assigned a unique capacity for mediating across social and spiritual boundaries. This allowed them to perform tasks from which prominent men and women were constrained, making them, in essence, perfect servants. Written with precision and meticulously researched, The Perfect Servant will immediately take its place as a major study on Byzantium and the history of gender.
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