Of Hermes and Aphrodite:

An excerpt from the introduction to my Honours year dissertation, 'The Non-Binary Body in Western Art & Culture'.

Abstract

My proposal is that whilst non-binary bodies have been represented throughout art history, they have usually been created by artists not outside the mainstream but thoroughly within it, therefore operating with the privilege that comes with being an accepted artist – and that those who did challenge the accepted order would see their work criticised, marginalised or erased altogether. This is due to such bodies being variously classified as ‘low culture’, transgressive, or representative of the Other. I view this condition as a manifestation of the dichotomy which cuts across Western political, social and cultural life: namely, the ‘high/low’ opposition rigorously interrogated by Stallybrass & White in The Poetics & Politics of Transgression. For Stallybrass & White, this “high/low opposition...is a fundamental basis to mechanics of ordering...in European cultures”¹ in which the low is marginalised and rejected and yet paradoxically remains an essential component of the élite’s construction of itself. Thus, “the ‘top’ attempts to reject...the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover...that the top includes that low symbolically...”²; therefore “what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central (like long hair in the 1960s)³” and so becomes problematic when Outsiders attempt to express themselves in the imagery of their own perceived and constructed Otherness⁴. Even well into the 20^th Century, Piet Mondrian articulated the archaic attitude of the patriarchal heteronormative: “The female and the material...hamper the male tool of spiritual expression. A futurist manifesto’s proclamation of hate of the female is perfectly valid⁵.” Thus, this topic has very far-reaching consequences.

Chapter 1: Foundations – Classicism to Renaissance Ideals

“Neither male nor female, the androgyne figures a pleasurable fantasy of early memory of a moment before the realization of sexual difference. Marked both male and female, the hermaphrodite may be...a dream of sexual totality embodied by the figure of the phallic mother...¹” However, both forms “represent a threat to our given identity, and to the system of social roles which define us²”. While conjoined bodies have existed since the dawn of art, it is self-evident that it is the masculine principle in the West which has been dominant, and that the ‘high’ patriarchal culture has consistently resisted wider acceptance of such forms: “Although actual hermaphroditic or sexually aberrant bodies caused ‘fear and loathing’ in classical antiquity, the image of the hermaphrodite represented instead ‘an exalted state of nature and the divine’.³” Other than the Louvre’s Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Illustration 1), there exists virtually no other example of a classical hermaphroditic body in standard art reference books despite their apparent plenitude (and even that example is relegated to a footnote in Kenneth Clark’s canonical 1956 survey The Nude – while E.H. Gombrich makes no mention of it at all in The Story of Art⁴). Yet, “hermaphrodites, with female breasts and proportions but male genitals, were popular in ancient art, particularly in the Hellenistic period. Many Roman copies of Greek statues exist...⁵”. The profane encounter is also represented, with variants on the Satyr and Hermaphrodite theme in Roman sculpture, and Pompeiian wall mural⁶, and clothed female figures lifting robes to reveal male genitalia beneath⁷ – although such subjects were deemed unsuitable for general viewing and in recent times were hidden in the ‘secret museum’ for the exclusive perusal of educated, wealthy gentlemen of taste. By virtue of their Otherness through their unusual anatomies, these bodies were classified as culturally low – possibly even in their own time, as the erotic element in Roman copies of Grecian originals is often more than a hint. But that they exist at all, and were created by masterful artisans of their time, appears to be highly problematic for the orthodox establishment.

Yet contrary to the tendency of the canon to erase or re-label the non-binary form⁸, its presence has nonetheless reoccurred throughout the narrative of Western art. According to Jill Burke, Michelangelo “famously sought to give his female figures what he deemed the best qualities of humanity in general. In this, he was following a trend in Italian intellectual circles that praised androgyny as the most beautiful form.⁹’” Maybe, but these trends were not universal: “In the early 1550s, the architect and painter Pirro Ligorio (c. 1512–1583) complained about painters who made “women with...appearances...so far removed from feminine delicacy that a painter of pumpkins would be ashamed of them, with...harsh muscles and breasts like citrons, and they are so muscular and strangely put together¹⁰,” whilst Ludovico Dolce’s treatise Aretino compares Michelangelo unfavourably with Raphael: “Michelangelo...does not recognise or else is unwilling to take into account those distinctions between the ages and the sexes...¹¹”

For authorities whose worlds consist of ordered definitions, non-binary bodies cannot be policed the same way as clearly gendered entities – ambiguity is problematic for a culture which was conceived under patriarchal Greek and Middle-Eastern belief systems, where female voices were not heard and patrilineage was a cornerstone (in the case of Athens, granted by virginal Athena, Zeus’ proxy, who spawned directly from the god himself with no female input). As Thomas Laqueur sums up, “...for hermaphrodites the question was...to which gender the architecture of their bodies most readily leant itself. The concern of magistrates was less with corporeal reality...than with maintaining clear social boundaries, maintaining the categories of gender¹²”. Thus despite the knowledge of intersex physiologies, the discourse of gender has, for as long as recorded history (in the dominant, ‘high’ Western civilisations, at least), crammed all persons into a binary straitjacket, with penalties for those whom the jacket did not fit.¹³. As Anne Fausto-Sterling notes, the efforts of 19^th and early 20^th Century analytical science to narrow the definition of ‘true’ hermaphroditic or intersexed bodies ensured that “people of mixed sex all but disappeared, not because they had become rarer, but because scientific methods classified them out of existence”¹⁴.