Those who wrote about castrati described them in terms which emphasised their physical difference and their value as ‘instruments’, but obscured or denied their subjectivity as human beings. They are thus an apt reminder, at the beginning of this book, of the difficulties we face as readers when trying to imagine what it was like to live with, in, and through an anomalous body. Stories about the lives and loves of castrati were almost exclusively told from an outsider’s perspective. In examining writings about castrati, I will show how close attention to the altered body sometimes precluded engagement with the person who lived that body as something more than a singer and sex object. The castrato – a man gelded in childhood to preserve his youthful singing voice – provides a rare example of a body which was ‘created’ by surgery to fulfil a purpose. By contrast, this chapter deals with a group of people for whom surgery was a calculated decision, made by somebody close to them. Those who underwent amputations, mastectomies, and facial surgeries generally did so as a last resort. For most of the people in this book, bodily alteration was not a choice.
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