Women Men And Eunuchs

Download or read book Women, Men and Eunuchs written by Elizabeth James and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collected papers in this volume present a unique introduction both to the history of women, of men and eunuchs, or the third sex, in Byzantium and to the various theoretical and methodological approaches through which the topic can be examined. The contributors use evidence from both texts and images to give a wide-ranging picture of the place of women and Byzantine society and the perceptions of women held by that society. Women, Men and Eunuchs offers a unique and valuable exploration of the issue of gender in Byzantium, which will fascinate anyone interested in ancient and medieval history and gender studies.

Download or read book The Perfect Servant written by Kathryn M. Ringrose and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Perfect Servant reevaluates the place of eunuchs in Byzantium. Kathryn Ringrose uses the modern concept of gender as a social construct to identify eunuchs as a distinct gender and to illustrate how gender was defined in the Byzantine world. At the same time she explores the changing role of the eunuch in Byzantium from 600 to 1100. Accepted for generations as a legitimate and functional part of Byzantine civilization, eunuchs were prominent in both the imperial court and the church. They were distinctive in physical appearance, dress, and manner and were considered uniquely suited for important roles in Byzantine life. Transcending conventional notions of male and female, eunuchs lived outside of normal patterns of procreation and inheritance and were assigned a unique capacity for mediating across social and spiritual boundaries. This allowed them to perform tasks from which prominent men and women were constrained, making them, in essence, perfect servants. Written with precision and meticulously researched, The Perfect Servant will immediately take its place as a major study on Byzantium and the history of gender.

Download or read book The Female Eunuch written by Germaine Greer and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-02-06 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch in 1970 was a landmark event, raising eyebrows and ire while creating a shock wave of recognition in women around the world with its steadfast assertion that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation. Today, Greer's searing examination of the oppression of women in contemporary society is both an important historical record of where we've been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved.

Download or read book Celibate and Childless Men in Power written by Almut Höfert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a striking common feature of pre-modern ruling systems on a global scale: the participation of childless and celibate men as integral parts of the elites. In bringing court eunuchs and bishops together, this collection shows that the integration of men who were normatively or physically excluded from biological fatherhood offered pre-modern dynasties the potential to use different reproduction patterns. The shared focus on ruling eunuchs and bishops also reveals that these men had a specific position at the intersection of four fields: power, social dynamics, sacredness and gender/masculinities. The thirteen chapters present case studies on clerics in Medieval Europe and court eunuchs in the Middle East, Byzantium, India and China. They analyze how these men in their different frameworks acted as politicians, participated in social networks, provided religious authority, and discuss their masculinities. Taken together, this collection sheds light on the political arena before the modern nation-state excluded these unmarried men from the circles of political power.

Download or read book After Eunuchs written by Howard Chiang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For much of Chinese history, the eunuch stood out as an exceptional figure at the margins of gender categories. Amid the disintegration of the Qing Empire, men and women in China began to understand their differences in the language of modern science. In After Eunuchs, Howard Chiang traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing the centrality of new epistemic structures to the formation of Chinese modernity. From anticastration discourses in the late Qing era to sex-reassignment surgeries in Taiwan in the 1950s and queer movements in the 1980s and 1990s, After Eunuchs explores the ways the introduction of Western biomedical sciences transformed normative meanings of gender, sexuality, and the body in China. Chiang investigates how competing definitions of sex circulated in science, medicine, vernacular culture, and the periodical press, bringing to light a rich and vibrant discourse of sex change in the first half of the twentieth century. He focuses on the stories of gender and sexual minorities as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, philosophers, educators, reformers, journalists, and tabloid writers, as they debated the questions of political sovereignty, national belonging, cultural authenticity, scientific modernity, human difference, and the power and authority of truths about sex. Theoretically sophisticated and far-reaching, After Eunuchs is an innovative contribution to the history and philosophy of science and queer and Sinophone studies.

Download or read book The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society written by Shaun Tougher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The existence of eunuchs was one of the defining features of the Byzantine Empire. Covering the whole span of the history of the empire, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries AD, Shaun Tougher presents a comprehensive survey of the history and roles of eunuchs, making use of extensive comparative material, such as from China, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, as well as about castrato singers of the eighteenth century of Enlightenment Europe, and self-castrating religious devotees such as the Galli of ancient Rome, early Christians, the Skoptsy of Russia and the Hijras of India. The various roles played by eunuchs are examined. They are not just found as servile attendants; some were powerful political players – such as Chrysaphius who plotted to assassinate Attila the Hun – and others were prominent figures in Orthodoxy as bishops and monks. Furthermore, there is offered an analysis of how society thought about eunuchs, especially their gender identity - were they perceived as men, women, or a third sex? The broad survey of the political and social position of eunuchs in the Byzantine Empire is placed in the context of the history of the eunuch in general. An appendix listing key eunuchs of the Byzantine Empire describing their careers is included, and the text is fully illustrated.

Download or read book Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs written by Anonymous and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of Diary of an Oxygen Thief and Chameleon in a Candy Store is back with the spellbinding conclusion to the series. You’ve never seen romance do this before. So brutally honest and breathtakingly perverse you’ll want to throw this book at the wall, but you’ll also want to know if it can possibly get any more disturbing (it can and it does). And as you start to wonder whether men and women were ever even meant to be together, a surprise ending brings the trilogy full circle and provides unexpected closure to an issue raised by a certain photographer's assistant in the first book. Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs is about how we love today and how increasingly we try to avoid it altogether.