Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood.

Gary Taylor. Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.307 pp. index. append. $25. ISBN: 0-415-92785-4.

Gary Taylor is ambitious. In his most recent book he seeks nothing less than a total rethinking of masculinity in western civilization. Recognizing this as an unwieldy task, Taylor goes about his reexamination of masculinity via a discussion of the history of castration--hence the subtitle to his book--a cut or "Abbreviated History."

Taylor claims that we have consistently misunderstood references to castration in pre- and early modern texts because we are influenced by what he calls the "Rise of the Penis," a phrase indicative of Taylor's playful prose. Secularization, the proliferation of contraception, and psychoanalysis have led us to think of sexuality in terms of pleasure rather than reproduction, in terms of the penis rather than the testicles. Pre- and early modern subjects, however, understood sex as primarily a reproductive act and therefore thought of the scrotum as the defining feature of the male's sexuality. Indeed, pre- and early modern references to castration, gelding, and eunuchs for the most part refer to removal of the testicles rather than the penis. For this reason, argues Taylor, Freud's theory of the castration complex is inadequate for understanding any pre- or early modern reference to castration and its relation to sexual identity and culture.

To demonstrate the importance of historicizing castration, Taylor works with a number of texts, too many to enumerate, but devotes most of his attention throughout to Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess, a play which functions as a test-case for nearly all of Taylor's major points. While placing so much emphasis on a minor seventeenth-century text may seem precarious, the play proves rich enough--or is enriched enough by Taylor's interpretive skill--to warrant much of the attention he gives it. In A Game at Chess, castration is most immediately related to Catholic Spain's potential influence on the court of King James I, represented in the play as the Black House's attempt to dominate the White House. Castration is a metaphor for not only Spain's imperial aspirations but Catholicism's imposition of celibacy on its clergy and the censorship of controversial texts. Taylor, however, also works from this heavily contextualized moment outward toward considerations of not only local politics and religion but rac e, gender, and the technology of the post-human.

From his analysis of A Game at Chess, Augustine's The City of God, and other texts, Taylor surmises that castration functions as a third term among supposed binary oppositions. The eunuch complicates the male/female binary. Further, the eunuch bears a biological sign of a cultural practice, confusing the opposition between "nature" and "civilization," "essentialism" and "constructionism," and so on (175). The eunuch, then, is a deconstructive figure who challenges modern thought.

For this reason, perhaps, castration has often been a symbol for that which falls outside of a particular culture. For Augustine, the eunuch was a member of an alien religion. In antiquity imported slaves were often castrated so as to divert their attention from reproduction to production or service. But the service eunuchs rendered sometimes gave them a special status: eunuchs (from the Greek "bed-guards") were often guardians of harems and therefore close confidants of the powerful.

Furthermore, while modern thinkers have thought of castration as a mark of lack, Taylor reveals many ways in which eunuchs have been thought of as improved men. As early as the fourth century, castrati were found to have better singing voices than other men. By the eighteenth century, amid the "Rise of the Penis," castrati were at times objects of heightened sexual attention, affording sexual satisfaction without the risk of pregnancy. Many eunuchs have been notorious for their military prowess, and Matthew 19:12 suggests that castration makes Christian men holier than they would otherwise be. While unable to inseminate, explains Taylor, "eunuchs were not impotent in any other sense" (37).

While Taylor at times seems too preoccupied with disproving psychoanalysis and sometimes grants Middleton's play perhaps too much prominence, his book should prove important to anyone interested in the early modern sexuality. It offers a new perspective and massive rethinking of gender and sexualization and shows how such a reconception extends to a variety of cultural discourses. Through this subtle reading of the history of castration Taylor suggests that modern conceptions of gender need to be reevaluated. "Anatomy might still be destiny," writes Taylor, "but we are increasingly able to alter our anatomies and shop for our destinies" (233).