Marta Vicente

After completing her first monograph Clothing the Spanish Empire Prof. Vicente (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 1999) became interested in examining how notions of sex and gender were constructed in the eighteenth century. In 2017 she published Debating Sex and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Spain with Cambridge University Press. This book examines how medical controversies over individuals with ambiguous sexual and gender traits challenged early modern notions of sex and gender. After 1700, medical discoveries held the promise of resolving all mysteries about sex formation and establishing once and for all a clear-cut distinction between males and females. Yet, despite the euphoria of surgeons and anatomists, their discoveries failed to answer questions such as, why some men with “perfect” sexual organs acted like women, or why some women capable of giving birth looked like men. These unusual cases challenged a strictly medical explanation of sexuality, and led to debates about legal, philosophical, and social definitions of man and woman. Besides this monograph, recently published articles are “Pornography and the Spanish Inquisition: The Reading of Le Portier des Chartreux, a Forbidden Best Seller,” and “Staging Femininity in Early Modern Spain.” Currently she is completing her next book-length manuscript tentatively title Reinventing Nature: Transgender Narratives from the Inquisition to the Internet on transgender narratives across history, from 1500 to the present.