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You find three sexes in Naples: men, women, and us, the castrati. Music lovers think we are angels with seducing voices, Gods, musici, while for the rest of the world castrati are just fat, repulsive capons to tease. At school normal students call us “the not wholes”, but the truth is that I'm only a regular boy who enjoys singing and doesn't have balls. I'm not an emasculate bird that hangs from the butcher's hook, nor a carnival freak. Who cares if my face and chest are hairless, or my limbs too long? But sometimes, all those smirks and furtive glances at me make my hands twitch, and I'd wish to have all my body's pieces back. I don't even remember any longer how testicles feel like, when I pee or wash myself and touch that bumping scars tissues, they feel as a natural part of my body; the memory of the operation, on the other hand, is still haunting me today. I was ten when four men stripped off my tattered clothes and put me in a steaming milk bath to soften my genitals; the warmth slowed down my galloping heartbeat, and I almost fell asleep when they suddenly picked me up and tied me on an atilt table with my head down. I squirmed and implored them to release me, but they just ignored me and pulled firmly the straps around my ankles and wrists. Then, the curved knife arrived. I ejected a primal scream and fainted. When I woke up, I was at my music school's infirmary with two others kids and a pungent smell of herbs and blood; it took me fifteen days to look under those brownish, stained bandages. I wondered if, to keep my treble voice, I had destroyed my whole existence. My school, the conservatory Pietà dei Turchini, is also my home. In the past, this kind of institution gathered foundlings who earned some money for their lo... ... middle of paper ... ...iates through my body. I don't respond. “Answer my question, Leonardo Ponti.” I shake my head. Maestro Spina leaves stiffly the room, and when he returns he's holding a whip. “Blasted kids, bent!” he orders, whipping our butts. “One week of prison for both of you.” “I will tell my dad about this unfairness,” Cesare babbles. “Fighting is against our rules,” the teacher snaps. “Tomorrow I have to go to the rector's office for the King's opera,” I object. “Oh, you're talking now?” Maestro Spina grumbles. “Next time think twice before doing something stupid.” “Maestro, Cesare provoked me,” I say. “Do you want to stay for two weeks in the dungeon?” “No, but…” I say meekly. “Out of my way.” I want to say something else to defend myself, but this time words are useless. I give a fleeting glance at Cesare before shuffling toward the prison. A poke in the gut is less painful.
When it comes to music history, the Castrati are one of the most important and debated topics. The Castrati were men (in Italian opera) that had been castrated during puberty to stop a flow of hormones, causing them to have the voice of a soprano woman, but the vocal power of an older, full-grown man. A general estimate said that four thousand boys a year were castrated in Italy. Some Castrati tried to make it in church choirs (which often gave them almost nothing of monetary value), most chose the opera route. They reigned supreme when they got onstage, being the obvious star of the show. They were the master performers that drew the crowd in with their amazing voices. During the Baroque period, they made up more than half of the soprano singers in opera.
The binding of feet is extremely dangerous. Women today still harm themselves in a different kind of “binding”. What was once a fetish called footbinding, the forcible deformation of feet into the shape of a lotus, was the necessity of a lifestyle dangerous to oneself; although
“No, you rip those boys right off him. You can’t always defend yourself. You’ll have to be willing to fight for things you love.”
Archilochus wore this persona as well, believed to have gone through an initiation brought on by the muses (Heller “Greek Lyric Overview”). For Archilochus, the function that he was putting forward the muses’s words can serve as a blurred line that helps to separate his work from his own individual poetic agendas. Yet, his individual agency cannot be circumvented. In “To An Ex-Mistress” we see Archilochus’s own qualms come to bare, “such was the lust for sex that, worming in under my heart, quite blinded me and robbed me of my young wits…” (fr. 191W). Reminiscent of Sappho, Archilochus brings in sexuality as a topic of investigation and one can only imagine what social setting Archilochus might have chosen to degrade his ex-lover. Was this piece presented for humor or was this piece a serious analysis of man’s own fragility to his sexual desires? Here, we see how social context can certainly illuminate the impact of the poet’s
The primary element of this book consists of a fictional procedure called “unwinding”. In this procedure, a person must stay awake while their limbs and organs are being surgically removed from their body. These kids were brought up to fear this procedure, yet it is encouraged as a sort of good for humanity. By unwinding someone, another person gets to enjoy the limbs of another whether it’s because they are in dire need of a heart or in desperate need of an arm. This
The pervasive notion of woman as property, prized indeed but more as object than as person, indicates one aspect of a deep-seated sexual pathology in Venice. [. . .] Fear of women’s sexuality is omnipresent in Othello. Iago fans to flames the coals of socially induced unease in Othello, fantasizes on his own about being cuckolded by Othello and Cassio. In an ideology that can value only cloistered, desireless women, any woman who departs from this passivity will cause intense anxiety. (295)
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice has been attributed to various psychological, mythical, racial, social sources: Othello’s status as racial outsider in Venetian society, his pagan roots in Christian society, hubris and/or hamartia in Othello or in Desdemona. While any of these interpretations no doubt helps to inform a fuller discussion of the play, I would like to focus the question of the cause of this tragedy in another area: the realm of gender. I will argue that the tragedy occurs as a result of the protagonists’ overwhelming adherence to their society’s stereotyped gender roles, and that Iago further encourages and manipulates these gender roles to his own ends. In this essay, I use the word “gender” to describe those physical, biological, behavioral, verbal, textual, mythic, and power dynamic cues that signal to others in the society, specifically the society of this play, that one is perceived as belonging or not belonging to a specific category of masculine or feminine (Bornstein 26-30). I will also use Kate Bornstein’s definition of “gender roles”: the “positions and actions specific to a given gender as defined by a culture” (26).
There are, as Mulvey explains, two ways a man can potentially escape castration anxiety. One is a voyeuristic route in which the man is concerned with re-enacting the "original trauma." Here the man is concerned with asc...
bites his thumb at, he loses his courage. "No sir I do not bite my
Even in today’s society, sexism is still prevalent and inhibits the people who are affected by it. For the purpose of this essay, sexism will be defined as any action that consciously contributes to a gender stereotyping society. In her essay, Marilyn Frye notes this definition of sexism stating that “making decisions on the basis of sex reinforces the patterns that make it relevant” (846). Therefore, any decision that contributes to the gender binary and its framework is considered sexist. The musical Gypsy has instances in which the main character, Rose, can be considered both going against and contributing to the “patterns that make sex relevant.” In one scene, Rose can be seen subjecting her children to gender roles which feeds in to sexism,
This paper will look at the different conceptions highlighted by Bulman in his article through the use of different methods used by the actors in the play. Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare captures the different conceptions of gender identity and different sexualities within the Elizabethan period.
In addition to the way that the Phantom thinks of Christine, Raoul’s interactions with Christine also prove that The Phantom of the Opera supports archaic gender ...
Triggiano, Tonia Bernardi. "Dante’s Heavenly Lessons: Educative Economy in the Paradiso." Essays in Medieval Studies 26.1 (2010): 15-26. Project MUSE. Web. 1 Apr. 2014.
The social conditions that contributed to the style of the Baroque are of particular importance, as well. During these years, it was very common for the rulers of that time to hold absolute power over their people. Some will call it the “age of absolutism”. Because of this, many common people never really experienced the benefits of this era. This was reserved for the wealthy and well-connected in that society. The politics of the day were driven b...
In this poem, the narrator compares his hands to his father’s, which seems to be portrayed to be the hands of a surgeon. For example, words which hold surgical connotation were used to describe the father’s hands, such as “stitch”, “scalpel” and the “Lancet”. Through using these words, it has set an image of the father as a surgeon and also the type of personality which a typical surgeon may possess...