Sexed trajectories: Reading an intersex woman’s buggery trial in early modern Scotland
Presenter Title/Affiliation
University of Oxford
Start Date
23-5-2021 11:30 AM
Event Name
Panel discussion
Panel Number
21
Panel Chair Name
Adi Bharat
Zoom URL to Join
https://ciis.zoom.us/j/98982386618
Zoom Meeting ID
989 8238 6618
Abstract
This paper advances the research agendas of queer historical linguistics (Leap 2020) and embodied sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz and Hall 2016) by offering a case study of the discursive interface between sexed embodiment and sexual behaviour in early modern Britain. In 1653, eighteen-year-old Margaret Raine was indicted before a court in Edinburgh for committing buggery with a mare—or possibly with a stallion. Upon surgical examination, Raine was pronounced to be not a woman but a hermaphrodite—or possibly a man. Conflicting accounts of Raine’s sex (and, in turn, that of the horse) arose as reports of her trial spread from legal records to news periodicals, and even into early English dictionaries grappling with the question of how to define the ‘natural’ limits of sexual acts and anatomies. By addressing Raine with the anachronistic term intersex, this paper expands historical work into using intersex as a critical lens through which to scrutinize the social and institutional policing of the body—intersex itself being ‘a sign constantly under erasure, whose significance always carries the trace of an agenda from somewhere else’ (Holmes 2009: 2). Drawing on tools from discourse analysis and queer theory—Blommaert’s (2005) concept of text trajectories and Butler’s (1993) interpretation of the bodily schema—this paper investigates how Raine’s personhood was discursively transformed across an array of early modern text types.
Presenter Contact
stephen@turton.co.za
Sexed trajectories: Reading an intersex woman’s buggery trial in early modern Scotland
This paper advances the research agendas of queer historical linguistics (Leap 2020) and embodied sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz and Hall 2016) by offering a case study of the discursive interface between sexed embodiment and sexual behaviour in early modern Britain. In 1653, eighteen-year-old Margaret Raine was indicted before a court in Edinburgh for committing buggery with a mare—or possibly with a stallion. Upon surgical examination, Raine was pronounced to be not a woman but a hermaphrodite—or possibly a man. Conflicting accounts of Raine’s sex (and, in turn, that of the horse) arose as reports of her trial spread from legal records to news periodicals, and even into early English dictionaries grappling with the question of how to define the ‘natural’ limits of sexual acts and anatomies. By addressing Raine with the anachronistic term intersex, this paper expands historical work into using intersex as a critical lens through which to scrutinize the social and institutional policing of the body—intersex itself being ‘a sign constantly under erasure, whose significance always carries the trace of an agenda from somewhere else’ (Holmes 2009: 2). Drawing on tools from discourse analysis and queer theory—Blommaert’s (2005) concept of text trajectories and Butler’s (1993) interpretation of the bodily schema—this paper investigates how Raine’s personhood was discursively transformed across an array of early modern text types.
https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/lavlang/2021/sunday/1
