#bibliography

so there's a couple of things here. first of all, castration has been practiced across many cultures in many different time periods, including VERY VERY different processes and procedures / levels of intervention. for example, in medieval europe it was often the only available treatment for issues like testicular torsion. in other times and parts of europe, it was explicitly punishment for a crime, or done for the sorts of reasons that might come to mind (castrato singers, performers, etc.); "eunuch" is also a social position that not all castrated men fit into, so you may want to also search for "castrate," "castration," etc., separately.

all of these places had very different rules about to whom these procedures could be done (e.g. could it be done to coreligionists? to children without consent? to children with the consent of their parents?). there's also like i said extremely widely varying definitions of what castration and being a eunuch can look like, ranging between naturally occurring infertility or intersex conditions, through various forms of genital damage (e.g. acquired in war) or mutilation (e.g. a botched circumcision), to intentional castration, which like i said can also vary in appearance and function, ranging from vasectomy, crushing of the [attached] testicles, orphiectomy, up through total ablation (orphiectomy with penectomy).

you will probably be able to find a decent amount of information if you search for "eunuchs in..." one of the main cultures we're looking at, which include, but probably are not limited to: oh my god i typed so much bullshit here and none of it was useful. cutting all of that and making it an ACTUAL BULLET POINT LIST.

ancient near east (we're looking at all the assyrian/akkadian/etc semitic cultures, also i think maybe egypt at some times and places but don't quote me on that)

classical greece (mostly slaves imported from the ANE)

classical rome (also many imported slaves, also a legal punishment; orphiectomy was outlawed at one point so they developed a crushing technique that destroyed generative capacity without removing the testicles which is used in much of the old world from that point fwd).

as well as medieval and early modern:

persia, islamic world, islamic caliphates

mughal empire / indian subcontinent

western europe (primarily italy both in [dubiously-legal] practice and as a crossroads for imports from the near/mid-east)

byzantine europe

china (i know calling anything in china medieval is bad periodization but i know the least about this region and history).

i don't know of any new world, australasian, or southern/non-mediterranean african cultures that practiced castration but that definitely does not mean none exist, it just means that i don't know about them (or that it may not be possible to know whether they did or not for evidentiary reasons).

a lot of these cases include large portions of that culture's civil service, to the extent that in some places the words for eunuch and civil servant are the same. but it's also more generally worth keeping in mind that the social world available to nontraditionally sexed bodies would have been very different along gendered lines.

i think a lot of what's in my eunuchposting tag has citations when i posted stuff from articles but here's a quick bibliography scared up out of my pdfs.

i'm going to say up front that not all of these are particularly kind or generous to people with nonstandard genitalia, gender expression, gender performance, etc., both in the sense of (1) clueless cis academics writing before the trans tipping point and in the sense of (2) trans/allied academics attempting to find commonality between a voluntary gender transition and a genital mutilation typically performed on enslaved people without consent. i find both of these things extremely upsetting personally, and because i find them upsetting i am not going to dig into every source here to remember which way it leans; caveat lector!

Ringrose, K. “Eunuchs in Historical Perspective” History Compass 5/2 (2007): pp. 495–506. <- this one comes first and out of order because it's a good overview.

Chiasson, C. (1984) “Pseudartabas and His Eunuchs: Acharnians 91-122”: Classical Philology, Vol. 79, No. 2 : pp. 131-136.

Finucci (2003). The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance. Duke University Press. (this one rules for real actually)

Ringrose, K. (2003) The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium. University of Chicago Press.

Frier, B. & T. McGinn, eds (2004). A Casebook on Roman Family Law, pps. 23-30, 363-364 (case of subfecundity); see also primary source 48.8.4. Ulpianus, On the Duties of Proconsul, Book VII (outlawing castration).

Brown, A. (2007?) "Painting the Bodiless: Angels and Eunuchs in Byzantine Art and Culture." (paper given at Sexualities: Bodies, Desires, Practices, 4th Global Conference? on academia.edu)

Bano, S. (2008) "Eunuchs in Mughal Empire & Court," in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 69. (on jstor)

Everhart, Janet S. (2010) “Jezebel: Framed by Eunuchs?”: Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 4 : pp. 688-698.

Lewis, D. (2011) “Near Eastern Slaves in Classical Attica and the Slave Trade with Persian Territories”: The Classical Quarterly, New Series: Vol. 61, No. 1: pp. 91-113. (on jstor)

Todd, S.C. “Male Slave Sexuality and the Absence of Moral Panic in Classical Athens”: Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol. 56, No. 2 (2013): pp. 37-53. (on jstor) <- might not have eunuch stuff in it but i cited it in a paper on 'em so it might.

Tracy, L. ed. (2013) Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press.

Crawford, K. (2019). Eunuchs and Castrati: Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe. Routledge.

Watts Belser, J. (2020): “Disability Studies in Jewish Culture in Late Antiquity: Gender, Body, and Violence Amidst Empire,” in A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: Third Century BCE To Seventh Century CE (eds. Koltunn-Fromm, N, and Kessler, G), pp. 371- 389. <- same for this one, not sure whether it's got eunuch stuff in but i did cite it.

Strassfeld, M. (2022) Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature. University of California Press. <- I HATE THIS BOOK and i think it's extremely bad, and extremely susceptible to complaint 2 above. however it's really accessible and easy to read even with no background in talmud, and it has a good bibliography.

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