Partner, Nancy, 'No Sex, No Gender', Speculum 68 (1993), 419-43


Quick Summary

The trial of a nun accused of sleeping with a cross-dressed eunuch helps us to question our beliefs about male and female identity

  • Historical debates about ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ require a third term – ‘self’
  • Gregory of Tours recounts the trial of an abbess accused of sleeping with a man dressed as a woman
  • The cross-dressed man was still a man and not a socially constructed woman
Key Conclusion

Partner explores the fundamental notions of sexuality and identity through the prism of medieval women, thereby questioning a central premise of women’s history – the distinction historians have drawn between sexual identity and social identity. Partner concludes that historical debate around the terms ‘sex and gender’ are ‘just not enough… to address the complex issues of psychosexual identity and collective culture’ (p. 441). A third term “self” or “sexuality” is always needed to study a world which produces ‘men and women who do tend to be recognizably like others of their same sex (and class, society, etc.)… yet are quite distinct and individual seen “close up” (p. 442).

Content Overview

Partner begins with an account of a trial taken from the work of Gregory of Tours. According to this account, an abbess (nun) is accused of sleeping with a man who the abbess kept disguised in women’s clothing. The cross-dressed man is present at the trial, and it transpires that he is also a eunuch. Partner uses this case to question ‘what we are half-consciously including as necessary and sufficient conditions for male or female human identify’ (p. 421).

Further Findings

Partner concludes that the ‘cross-dressed man in the church at Poitiers, trapped between the failure of sex and the punishment of gender, was still a man and not a socially constructed woman’. Throughout the article Partner is critical of the ‘social constructionist vision of human life’ (p. 433), which asks endless variations on the question of whether femininity and masculinity are necessarily attached to genital anatomy. ‘The answer is too obviously no’ (p. 441).

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