Immaculate Forms

Immaculate Forms

“Never has medical history been more entertaining” (Dr Jennifer Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible) than in this turbulent history of women’s bodies from classical Greece to the modern age Breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb. Across history, these body parts have told women who they are and what they should do. Although knowledge of each part has changed through time, none of them tells a simple story. The way they work and in some cases even their existence have been debated. They can be seen as powerful or as disgusting, as relevant only to reproduction or as sources of sexual pleasure. In Immaculate Forms, classicist and historian Helen King explores the symbiotic relationship between religion and medicine and their twinned history of gatekeeping over these key organs that have been used to define “woman,” illustrating how conceptions of women’s bodies have owed more to imagination and myth than to observation and science. Throughout history, the way we understand the body has always been debated, and it is still shaped by human intervention and read according to cultural interpretations. Astute and engaging, Immaculate Forms is for everyone who has wondered what history has to say about today’s raging debates over the human body and who is “really” female.

Forms of Relation

Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation shows the importance of textual, religious, and bureaucratic ties to struggles over colonial governance and identities. Goldmark analyzes these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardized education, or the regulation of doctrine. Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how nonprocreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime.

The Conchologist