Mingle-Mangle: Masculine Women and Feminine Men

In his famous denouncement of cross-dressing Philip Stubbes raised the spectre of hermaphroditism in order to deride the monstrous perversion of so-called masculine women.2 Here, with a characteristic rhetorical flourish, Stubbes invoked the slur ‘hermaphrodite’ in order to rebuke cross-dressers. However, the term also signals a point of tension as the righteous diatribe stumbles into an awkward double negative. These cross-dressed women ‘maie not improperly be called Hermaphroditi’ not for their dubious sex but because of their dubious appearance. Masculine women were monstrous to Stubbes and to other early modern moralists not because they were physically hermaphroditic but because their behaviour (epitomized by their clothing) transgressed fixed gender codes. In other words, they enacted rather than embodied hermaphroditism. It was gender (culture) rather than sex (biology) that was at stake here.