Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History

625 Pages·29.829 MB·English

by  Gilbert Herdt

Third Sex, Third Gender

ThirdS ex,T hirdG ender
BeyondS exuaDli morphism
in Culturaen d History
Editebdy GilberHte rdt
ZONE BOOKS · NEW YORK
1996
© 1993 Gilbert Herdt
zone books
633 Vanderbilt Street
Brooklyn, NY 11218
All rights reserved.
First ebook edition 2020
isbn 978-1-942130-52-9
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
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press), without written permission from the Publisher.
Printed in the United States of America.
Distributed by Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey, and Woodstock, United Kingdom
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Third Sex, Third Gender: beyond sexual dimorphism,
in culture and history / edited and with an introduction
by Gilbert Herdt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-942299-82-5
1. Sexual deviation — History. 2. Hermaphroditism —
History. i. Herdt, Gilbert H., 1949–. ii. Title: 3rd sex,
3rd gender.
hq71.t57 1993
305 — dc20
93-2276
Contents
Preface 11
Introduction: Third Sexes and Third Genders,
Gilbert Herdt 21
PART ONE HISTORICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Living in the Shadows: Eunuchs and Gender in
Byzantium, Kathryn M. Ringrose 85
II London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to
Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture,
Randolph Trumbach 111
III Sodomy and the Pursuit of a Third Sex in the Early
Modern Period, Theo van der Meer 137
IV "A Female Soul in a Male Body": Sexual Inversion as
Gender Inversion in Nineteenth-Century Sexology,
Gert Hekma 213
V Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans,
Rene Gremaux 241
PART Two ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
VI Polynesian Gender Liminality Through Time
and Space, Niko Besnier 285
VII How to Become a Berdache: Toward a Unified
Analysis of Gender Diversity, Will Roscoe 329
VIII Hijras: An Alternative Sex and Gender Role
in India, Serena Nanda
373
IX Mistaken Sex: Culture, Biology and the Third Sex
in New Guinea, Gilbert Herdt 419
X Transcending and Transgendering: Male-to-Female
Transsexuals, Dichotomy and Diversity,
Anne Bolin 447
Notes 487
Contributors 597
Index 599
This book is dedicated to
Martin P. Levine
Naar Vriendschap Zulk een Mateloos Verlangen.':'
( For friendship, such an endless longing.)
*Cited in Karin Daan, "Het homomonument," in Gert Hekma and D. Kraakman
(eds.), Coed Verkeerd: Een geschiedenis van homoseksuele mannen en lesbische vrowen
in Nederland (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1989), pp. 199-200.

Nature is never constrained to change, and that which
is once formed cannot simply will to reverse itself
wrongly, since desire is not nature. Desire can alter
the character of something already formed, but it
cannot remake its nature. It is true that many birds
change with the seasons, both their colors and their
voices .... But they cannot change a whit of their
actual nature .... Nor can it be believed that the hyena
ever changes its nature or that the same animal has at
the same time both types of genitalia, those of the
male and the female, as some have thought, telling of
marvelous hermaphrodites and creating a whole new
type -a third sex, the androgyne, in between a male
and female. They are certainly wrong not to take into
account how devoted nature is to children, being
the mother and begetter of all things.
-Clement of Alexandria (d. ca. 215 A.D.)'-'
Two sexes are not the necessary, natural consequence of
corporeal difference. Nor, for that matter, is one sex.
-Thomas Laqueurt
Navaho and Pokot take, in their different ways, the view
that intersexuals are a product, if a somewhat unus­
ual product, of the normal course of things -gifted
prodigies, botched pots -where the Americans ...
apparently regard femaleness and maleness as exhaust­
ing the natural categories in which persons can
conceivably come: what falls between is a darkness,
an offense against reason.
-Clifford Geertz:j:
*"Paedogogus 2.10," trans. John Boswell, in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 356.
tThomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cam­
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 243.
:j:Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1984 ), p. 85.