Sensuality as Disability - Victorians and Precocious Puberty

Since this week (22 November to be precise) marked the start of Disability History Month here in the UK, we thought that it was a  good time to draw your attention to a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies from 2008, which explores the subject of "Critical Transformations: Disability and the Body in Nineteenth-Century Britain". Best of all, the issue, guest edited by Mark Mossman and Martha Stoddard-Holmes, is available free online in full.

Pieter Paaw, "Skeleton and Skull of a
Child." (1633), © University of Toronto
Library, 2003 

The journal offers a number of interesting articles exploring the intersection of gender and disability, such as Joyce L. Huff's "The Domesticated Monster: Freakishness and Disability in Fitz-James O'Brien's 'What Was It?'". Yet what is perhaps most interesting within the context of this conference (and this blog) is the inclusion of M. Jeanne Peterson's "Precocious Puberty and the Victorian Medical Gaze".

Peterson's article considers the responses on the part of Victorian medical reports to cases of precocious puberty and the way that they were tied to anxieties surrounding conceptions of gender, bodily normalcy, even the state of childhood itself. In so doing, she demonstrates, to quote Mossman and Stoddard-Holmes's introduction to the issue, "the fecundity of visual and structural disruptions of “normal” masculinity and femininity for narratives of pathology and normalcy." The introduction goes on to note that the article

"work[s] on the continuum on which the normal and the extraordinary both reside, noting the various points (and convergences) of discomfort, apprehension, attraction, and wonder these “extraordinary cases” produce"

In consciously choosing to place early-onset puberty within the discourse of disability, Peterson acknowledges that her decision may raise some questions, given that,

"precocious puberty would seem more a case of early ability rather than disability. But early puberty can also be understood as deviance, as straying from norms of bodily development. In the phenomena of early puberty doctors found amazement, desire, and dread."

In Peterson's study, then, the precocious development of physical markers of puberty, those undeniable indicators of the body's eroticism, its sensuality, become in and of themselves an illustration of disability. This definition of the preciously pubescent body would seem to bind Victorian constructions of disability, of exceptional bodies, to the sensual body in a way which is often overlooked. Sensuality here stands at the very core of disability, in stark contrast to a traditional conception in which the senses,  if not deliberately removed, are at the very least forgotten.

Grotesque Bodies

If you are passionate about film and television monsters, featuring explicit gore, graphic violence and depictions of various taboos, Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media might have the right ingredients to satisfy your particular appetites. To be more specific, Intensities No. 4, December 2007, offers a special edition entitled Mysterious Bodies, containing a range of brilliant essays on alien bodies, vampires, ‘Gothic’ body parts, sex and violence in the Muppet Show, the dead bodies of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and many others.

Gerard de Lairess, Plate T.55, "Abdominal Organs, Uterus
and Placenta of  a Pregnant Woman" from Govard
Bidloo's Anatomia Humani Corporis (1685)
Images are copyright the University of Toronto Library

The edition includes an article by Peter Hutchings entitled ‘Grotesque Bodies and the Horror of Comedy in League of Gentlemen’ which deserves special mention, especially for its illuminating comments regarding the show’s dark humor, acceptability, graphic depictions of decomposing, dissected grotesque bodies and its distinctiveness resisting simplistic explanations and contextualization.

Opening the article, Hutchings writes:

The comedy show 'The League of Gentlemen', which first appeared on British television in 1999 and ran until 2002, was probably not to everyone’s taste. Themes explored through three series and a Christmas special included murder, kidnapping and imprisonment, incest , monstrosity and deformity, masturbation, transvestism and transexuality, dead children, cruelty to animals, the imbibing of urine, erotic asphyxiation, vampirism, voodoo, implicit cannibalism (a rare moment of restraint), limb grafting and a plague of nosebleeds. Add nudity, some violence and gore, the occasional use of the word 'fuck', and an obsessive fixation on bodies marked in various ways as grotesque, and you end up with a most unusual recipe for TV comedy.

This ‘unusual recipe’ produced a clever work whose very cleverness, in Hutchings' view, shielded it from ‘accusations of vulgarity and coarseness and made it a suitable object for critical praise.’ The show, comparable to Monty Python, intelligently invokes comic and horror traditions creating a rich fabric of cultural references. Hutchings also reflects on the characters’ physical grotesquerie, which served as a starting point for the show’s characterizations, driven by obsessive desires and impulses and the role of transvestism where the male performers frequently play the roles of both male and female. The article concludes with an illuminating examination of the grotesque bodies in terms of horror, parts of which deserve to be quoted in full:

Cornelis Huyberts, Thes: 7, tab. 2 (Brain with pia mater,
arm of a child, hydatiform mole, fetal membranes,
lips), from Frederic Ruysch,
Opera omnia anatomico-medico-chirurgica (1737) 

In this veritable parade of attractions, grotesque bodies provide some continuity, with body-anxiety a major theme, albeit one that is modulated in different, generically specific ways as the show progresses. The deployment of grotesque bodies, defined in relation to both comedy and horror traditions, also helps to articulate the peculiar televisual character of a show that seems very much to be defining itself in terms of the limits of what can actually be shown on television. (…) Repeatedly, the emphasis is on what we cannot see, with the limits of our vision of ten associated with partially glimpsed bodies. We cannot see the source of the infected meat (although we might presume that it is human flesh), we cannot see the monster above the shop, we cannot see Barbara in all her transsexual glory. Instead the show alludes to extra - televisual generic worlds that are not fully representable within television itself, with those allusions drawing the attention of an audience – or at least a generically knowledgeable audience – precisely to what they are missing. 

Finally, the monstrous, dissected, infected, distended, distorted and transgressive bodies featured in this article remain rich in allusions and contradictions, leaving us wondering, intrigued by their distinctiveness as we fill the gaps with our own imagination. Whether your exploration of monstrous bodies as depicted in both film and in television concerns gender politics, sexuality, horror, humor, the grotesque, gore, explicit violence, fetishism, breaking taboos and numerous others, the articles featured in this edition might inspire criticisms or simply - spark your research interests and encourage your imagination.