come closer. i have a normal amount of information and opinions about eunuchs and can be relied upon to discuss other things.
[sitting in front of you with my chin in my hands]
and would you be willing to share it?
apropos of specifics the thing I'm always prepared to rant about is that I almost never see eunuchs engaged with in fiction in a way that understands how the institution actually worked.* Varys in Game of Thrones is an example of the type, where eunuch characters are often evil and always singular, when the thing is that when eunuchs appeared historically they were as part of a class of eunuchs because pre-sterilization of surgical tools castration is not a procedure that is regularly survived unless it's being done at enough of a rate that someone has a regular job doing it. this is both 'accumulating enough experience to do it in a way that gives at LEAST a 50% survival rate' and 'having a high enough demand for it that there are enough boys being castrated to make 50% survival worth it.'
Eunuchs were in demand, is the thing--most of my reading has involved the Byzantine and Ottoman methods with a smattering of info on the outgrowth from this to castratti (which were an early modern to modern thing, the Catholic church's relationship to castration is fascinating considering that in a lot of ways the priesthood replaced the social and political functions filled by eunuchs elsewhere). there's a good (academic) book by Kathryn Ringrose on eunuchs and the Byzantine empire and it's titled 'The Perfect Servant' because that's what they were considered to be. Eunuchs were cut off from the fundamental old age support system of most of human history, ie having biological family, and they were physically marked as being close to systems of wealth and power, because there was a demand for them, because they were considered the ideal servant, because they had nowhere else to go--
I'm going in circles. let me start smaller.
you are a ten year old boy from a poor family. you are made subject to extremely personal and extremely painful violence. if you live through it--BIG if--you are physically marked as an outsider for the rest of your life. you cannot have a 'normal' life. you can be taken to an imperial court where you all of a sudden have access to centers of wealth and power in a way you never had before. because you are considered to be the tool of the state, completely loyal to the state, and therefore it is possible for you to rise to a level of power most ten year old boys from poor families will never know the existence of. and you will suffer specific health problems for the rest of your life, related to the torture you were subjected to as a ten your old.
the thing is, under the Ottomans and under most of the Byzantines, castration was not legal. and eunuchs still served in the imperial palace. and for more than half of those eighteen centuries of history, to be a eunuch was to be enslaved. and to be physically marked as being enslaved. there was a big legal reform under the Byzantines that dictated that any slave who was castrated was automatically freed (ONCE AGAIN, IF THEY LIVED CAVEAT) to try and disincentivize people from castrating boys. and YET. they still demanded them.
under the Ottomans it was illegal to enslave Muslims and it was illegal to castrate. so of course a business thrived right outside the borders of the empire (in what's now Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan in particular) kidnapping or purchasing boys, castrating them, and enslaving the survivors, often selling them directly to the imperial palace or other similarly high positions of wealth and status because they were the only places that could afford enslaved boys that had survived castration.
it was LUCRATIVE. we have records of families signing their own sons up for this because it was such a direct shortcut to wealth. and the other wack ass family dynamic that comes into it is that eunuchs were a huge part of the household of the imperial family. there's a bit of an orientalist fantasy about the 'eunuch guarding the harem' and the way it's presented implies that the castration was for the purpose of guarding the harem but that's backwards. you don't castrate guys to guard your harem you have the castrated guys guard your harem because they're already around.
and i say 'guys' but the thing that got me interested in eunuchs was actually a leapfrog from queer history because i ran across examples taken from the Acta Sanctorum of monks who had been assumed to be eunuchs who had been discovered on their death to have female anatomy. so we have evidence that people took advantage of this socially-understood role that was excluded from normal gender presentation to conceal or justify gender variant traits.
and i say excluded because it was violent! it was a denial of masculinity to people who otherwise would have participated in some form of it, but eunuchs were still understood to be, even if just grammatically, men! but in many crucial ways they also weren't and this is where I start to get incoherent and wave my hands about how the sex and gender binaries are constructed and enforced via forcible exclusion and the acknowledgement of other categories existing even as they are denied certain types of personhood and where people ask me what the point is and i just go 'i don't KNOW but don't you just want to THINK ABOUT IT????'
and for the most part no people don't want to think about it. eunuchs are wildly understudied in Anglophone scholarship, which kind of makes me froth at the mouth because the proximity of the institution of eunuchs to imperial power structures--byzantine, ottoman, chinese, mughal--means that we have so manyyyyyyyyy records. the thing traditional history studies have demanded. AND YET.
catches breath. anyway. the catholic church disapproved of castration for most of its history and you needed an exemption from the pope if you wanted to be a priest and you had to prove the castration wasn't your fault. physical perfection situation. and for all my curiosity about eunuchs and gnashing of teeth at the lack of research i have taken my own formal research in completely different directions. i will stop here because i have a normal amount of information and opinions about eunuchs and can be relied upon to discuss other things.
*the exception to most fictional depictions of eunuchs i've seen is Elizabeth Bear's Pillars of the Sky fantasy series where the order of wizards is made of eunuchs, male and female, and the eunuchdom is a prerequisite to doing magic. it's not at all historically accurate but god dammit it's INTERESTING and takes into account the class-of-persons thing.
