Maureen Lauder. Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. Editor: Fedwa Malti-Douglas. Volume 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2007.
Castration refers to the removal of the testicles of a human or animal so as to render him infertile. Although castration technically refers to only removal of the testicles, the term is sometimes used to refer to the removal of the penis. In many cultures castration of humans is used as a punishment for crimes, while some religious sects have practiced castration as a means of dedicating the body to a god. In Asia and the Middle East, castrated men, known as eunuchs, were charged with protecting the harems of wealthy or powerful men from incursions by other men. As such eunuchs had a unique proximity to centers of power and often wielded enormous influence in their societies. In seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe, gifted male singers, known as castrati, were castrated before puberty to prevent their voices from deepening and changing registers. In spite of the elevated social status of eunuchs and castrati in earlier times, however, castration more recently tends to be utilized primarily as punishment for or prevention of sexual offenses.
Physiology
Generally speaking castration refers to any method whereby a male loses the use of his testes. Historically the most common means of castration involved the removal of the testicles from the body. The most important effect of castration is sterility. In the prepubescent, castration generally results in a less muscular frame, lack of sex drive, an undeveloped prominentia laryngea (Adam’s apple), and a high-pitched voice. Men who undergo castration after puberty normally experience a reduced sex drive, but such men can sometimes maintain an erection.
History
Human castration seems to have originated during the Stone Age, and archaeological evidence of eunuchs appears to follow the same distribution and chronology as animal domestication and human conquest. Thus as stable civilizations and communities spread from the Middle East outward to China and India, so too did eunuchs begin to appear in areas where humans settled. The first humans to be castrated were most likely prisoners of war who were enslaved rather than killed after capture.
It appears that the earliest institutional use of castration may have been the consecration of castrated slaves to Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of war. The followers of the goddess Cybele, a religious cult that dates from around 750 BCE and persisted into the early Christian era, voluntarily castrated themselves as a means of dedicating themselves to their goddess; evidence of the castration practice appears as early as 415 BCE.
Early Christians also occasionally saw castration as a means to spiritual salvation. The most famous of these, Origen, castrated himself circa 209 in an effort to follow the New Testament scripture Matthew 19:12, which refers to eunuchs “who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” Argument over the interpretation of this biblical passage raged among Christians for hundreds of years. At least one Christian sect required compulsory castration, but in 325 the Council of Nicaea condemned self-castration. In the fifth century, Saint Augustine pushed for an interpretation of Matthew’s text that read castration as an allegory for celibacy, a position that the Church espoused informally for several centuries before codifying it in 1139 with the outlaw of clerical marriage. In spite of the church’s attempt to read castration as mere celibacy, however, Pierre Abelard, a twelfth-century philosopher who was castrated by the outraged relations of his young lover, Heloise, firmly believed that his castration was divinely ordained and had brought him closer to God.
Although the Church had long since outlawed self-castration and though eunuchs were not a common feature of Western European medieval life, church choirs—which prohibited singing by women—utilized castrati. In this the Roman Catholic Church mimicked the Byzantine Church, in which eunuch choirs were traditional for hundreds of years. As noted castration prevented a boy’s voice from changing and deepening; in addition as he developed, the size and power of the castrato’s ribcage and lungs, combined with an unusually high vocal range, created a highly prized, unique singing voice. The castrati were regular features of church choirs by the sixteenth century and were common until the end of the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many castrati moved out of church choirs and into Italian opera houses, where their singing became a well-known, popular entertainment.
In contrast to the limited positions available to European eunuchs, castrated men in Asian, African, and Middle Eastern societies often wielded considerable social and political power. Eunuchs were often employed as household servants, entrusted with the personal care of the ruler. Expanding on the practices of their Roman, Byzantine, and Persian predecessors, medieval Muslim rulers used eunuchs not only to control their concubines and legitimate wives, but also in a variety of other domestic and ceremonial functions. Eunuchs were considered to be more loyal to their masters than intact men and, indeed, often were, as their positions close to society’s rich and powerful accorded them a certain level of prestige and influence. In many eastern cultures, including the Byzantine Empire, China, and Assyria, some of the most renowned commanders of armies and navies were eunuchs. In Greece, Persia, Rome, and China, household servants and palace guards were often eunuchs, sometimes organized into elaborate hierarchies. In one African state, eunuchs administered justice in the king’s name and controlled the line of succession. In both China and Vietnam, rulers trusted only eunuchs to fill the highest ranks of civil servants, believing that because they couldn’t reproduce, eunuchs would be less likely to try and establish their own dynasties. Nonetheless, it appears that Chinese eunuchs at times wielded considerable political power, and in seventeenth century Persia, palace eunuchs gained such effective control that for a number of years they ruled the country under a series of figureheads. In many cultures, most notably the Ottoman Empire, eunuchs were employed to guard the harems of the richest and most powerful men, thereby acquiring for themselves a social status and access to power that placed them close to the upper tiers of society.
By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in contrast to the powerful positions occupied by many eunuchs throughout history, societies in Europe and North America viewed castrated men primarily as weak, effeminate non-men. Even as early as Augustine’s fifth-century commentaries on eunuchs, the Christian European world had begun to regard the castrated man as something profoundly unnatural.
In 1908 psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud developed his theory of castration anxiety, which hypothesizes that a normal part of male childhood development includes the belief that girls have no penis because they have been castrated, thereby instituting a lifelong, subconscious anxiety on the part of the male that he too will lose his penis. While Freud’s theory has been largely discredited, it is noteworthy insofar as it signals a shift in thinking about castration. Until the twentieth century, castration referred almost exclusively to the removal of the testicles; Freud’s theory equates castration with the loss of the penis and, coupled with the theory’s female corollary, penis envy, situates the penis at the crux of masculine privilege and power. This understanding of the centrality of the penis can be seen at work in popular uses of the term castration, including as a metaphorical reference to a real or perceived lack of power on the part of male and to the emasculating effect of a powerful woman on a man.
Castration as Punishment and Treatment
Castration has long been used as a method of punishment for criminal acts in many societies. It was frequently used in the waging of war, as a means of punishing, controlling, or subjugating a fallen enemy. In the United States, in the decades following the Civil War, castration often accompanied the lynching of black men in the South as a simultaneous punishment for and warning against miscegenation, whether real or imagined. Castration was also used as a criminal sentence in many societies. In some cases, only the testicles were removed; in others all the genitalia were excised, often condemning the victim to a painful death. Prior to the eighteenth century, castration was often written into the law as punishment for certain crimes or specifically designated as the sentence for a particular crime. In Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, criminals were sometimes sentenced to death followed by dismemberment and castration.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sterilization was often used to control criminal populations and to punish or treat sex offenders. The development of vasectomy techniques (which sterilize by blocking the connection between the testicles and prostrate rather than by removing the testicles) in the nineteenth century meant that castration as such was no longer employed for treatment or punishment of criminals; the scientific nature of the new procedure appears to have made sterilization generally more palatable. In the early-twentieth century, the United States experimented with a number of procedures—often performed without the knowledge or consent of the victims—and sterilization laws designed to reduce the criminality of the general population and help maintain the purity of bloodlines in the face of high United States immigration rates. The discovery after World War II that Nazi doctors had experimented with similar sterilization techniques and policies dampened popular enthusiasm for the project. More recently chemical castration, which temporarily reduces testosterone production, has been attempted on a number of sex offenders, and, in the early-twenty-first century, the possibility and ethicality of legislating such treatment is under debate.