“Long Juana” and the So-Called Enlightenment

At the particular juncture in history which Martha Few deals with in her article “That Monster of Nature: Gender, Sexuality, and the Medicalization of a ‘Hermaphrodite’ in Late Colonial Guatemala,” Western Europeans and their colonial counterparts felt themselves to be at the peak of human understanding.  Charged for the crime of double-concubinage with both a man and a woman, Juana Aguilar was brought before the court, where her sexual ambiguity became the topic of discussion, warranting further medical examination.  In order to settle the matter,  renowned physician and harbinger of Enlightenment philosophy, Narciso Esparragosa was called in to perform a medical examination on  Juana so that she could be officially categorized, allowing the court to proceed with its ruling.

What I find interesting about this article is the belief that it was the duty and responsibility of Esparragosa, a man of science, steeped in the European tradition of the day, to scientifically determine and define Juana’s gendered identity for her.  Few makes the point that Juana’s own words, her opinions and emotions, are absent from the historical record, perhaps never recorded or considered at all, so that only Esparragosa, with his condescending and dehumanizing nicknames like “Juana La Larga” or simply “La Juana,” have authority in defining her body officially.  The exact power dynamics of the situation with regards to race and ethnicity are difficult to determine because Juana’s is not known and while we know that Narciso moved from Venezuala to Guatemala I am not sure we know his ethnicity or how closely he was connected to the colonial power structure.  Nevertheless, I feel that this is a prime example of the Western colonizers imposition of his (and I think its safe to say “his” here) own values and interpretations of the world onto the colonized people, in this case Juana.

In assuming a link between an enlarged clitoris and the deviant behavior of sodomy, the so-called scientific man unscientifically constructs a connection between a occurrance of the natural world, i.e. ambiguous genitalia, and a certain set of cultural behaviors, i.e. sodomy, deviance, etc.  This natural occurrence could be culturally interpreted any number of ways, yet Esparragosa and the culture from which he originates has chosen to connect hermaphroditism with a sense of abomination or deviance from nature, despite the fact that intersexuality is a natural occurence.

This episode can also be seen as cultural tyranny in the fact that he likens her “abnormal” condition to that commonly seen in Egyptian and other Eastern women.  Esparragosa’s definition of normal is clearly slanted to favor the West as the yardstick by which the rest of the world is to be measured.  His treatment of Juana, particularly his repeated attempts at creating an erection in her clitoris to see if she could perform sexually as a man, but also his appropriation of her rights to self-definition and voice, are despicable, humiliating, and ultimately dehumanizing.  Some Enlightenment, huh?