Infamous Stains

The Medici theologian and confessor who abuses a twelve-year-old boy; the Capuchin tormented by an exuberant physiology and fantasies about women; the doge who fails because of affairs that do not meet with public approval; the priest who from the confessional engages in carnal relations with his penitents; the convicts serving their sentences in galleys, suspected of sexual misconduct; Adam, rumored to have had unnatural intercourse with Eve, and Cain, thought to have sodomized his son. Whether real or imagined, the actions of these men raise questions and trigger normative reactions. And even when the condemnation is mild, the dismay they provoke is put into words, and limits between licit and illicit, moral and immoral, decent and indecent are drawn. In this continuous process of definition, an elusive object, but no less endowed with the capacity to affect individuals, seems to take shape: an ideal masculinity, defined in relation to the sexed body and its use.