Although the body presents itself to us as something purely organic, with an anatomical objectivity, the conditions of its representation and recognition have been subject to religious, political, scientific, technical and legal pacts that have been continuously modified over recent centuries: the normative representation of the body hides its historical quality and appears instead as nature. Our somatic- political condition is not natural but a symptom of techno-life: it is a historical composite of the diverse technologies that have built us. The modern notions of humanity and animality, of evolved races and primitive races, of femininity and masculinity, of homosexuality and heterosexuality, of cis bodies and trans bodies, of normality and pathology, and the protocols that determine their assignment or diagnosis, evolved in the West at the same time as and using the technologies of semiotic and visual representation. A political history of the body is a history of our shared prostheses. A technology is not an external machine, but a social relationship that modifies the conditions of production, extraction and distribution of energy, life and pleasure: it is this relationship that produces, destroys, controls, reduces or emancipates a body.

Every society invents a series of organs, designs a body and sets it in motion. Our bodies are a living palimpsest on which different processes of production and historical inscription overlap and intersect. The medieval body was theological- ‑theatrical-pictorial. The modern body was scientific-photo-cinematographic and the body into which we are converting is cyber-virtual-commercial. We are all those bodies at the same time: we are built by different systems of representation that sometimes enter into a normative alliance, and other times a state of friction or critical antagonism, in each case determining our conditions of life and death. Systems of reading, measurement or vigilance, military systems, systems of production, reproduction, taylorisation, logistical systems, visual and representative systems... that construct the body.

Not only is the body neither natural nor stable, but also, contrary to what is frequently claimed, there is nothing in the modern body as unstable as sex. Sexual difference is not an immutable religious, metaphysical or even anatomical truth, but rather a historical and political fact that is constantly subject to critique and change. Similarly, the criteria of binary sex assignment, despite the best intentions of authoritarian neo-naturalists from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán, not forgetting Vladimir Putin, are neither natural nor stable. On the contrary, organs and cells, the supposed biological enclaves of true sex, its representations and differences, have never ceased to fluctuate over the centuries.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, during the construction of the colonial empires and their later transformation into nation-states, theological epistemology transformed into scientific-technical epistemology. In medieval societies, sexual assignment was not a ‘medical act’, nor was there any explicit administrative inscription. The notions of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ did not yet exist: ‘flesh’ and ‘lust’ existed as theological-political notions. The cellular processes of sexual reproduction were unknown: it was believed that the lord and father created a life that then developed within the mother’s uterus. There was, therefore, only one sovereign body: the male. There was no ‘birth certificate,’ but rather the ‘certificate of baptism’ which stated whether the child was legitimate or illegitimate. Birth was a deferred event that only really took place during the baptism, when the body was recognised as Christian. There were documents that justified patriarchal or matriarchal inheritance only if there were properties to bequeath, as certified in the so-called ‘identity documents’; there were, within this binary regime, ‘daughters’ and ‘sons’, but only as bodies that families ‘exchanged’ for reproductive or economic purposes, as potential fathers and mothers; but there was not, strictly speaking, a scientific anatomy of sexual difference. As shown in the painting Magdalena Ventura with her husband and son, painted by Ribera in 1631, what is important is a body’s capacity to reproduce itself (hence the painter’s insistence on making visible the breast with which Magdalena feeds her baby), without what later scientific discourse called ‘secondary sexual characteristics’ taking on decisive importance (such as the beard, for example). Ribera’s annotation in Latin reads: ‘the great miracle of nature’. There were monsters, chimeras and miracles. There was not yet a scientific taxonomy of sexual abnormality. There were parochial records, certificates of sale, wills, estate inventories, criminal lawsuits, ecclesiastical and military registers, but in none of them was ‘sex’ a scientifically-defined anatomical biological variable.

Progressively, between the 16th and 19th centuries as, little by little, scientific knowledge began to displace faith, the political hierarchies between men and women became inscribed within the sphere of biology. Two processes accelerated the shift from a theological-political language to a scientific-technical taxonomy of sexual difference: colonial expansion and transatlantic slave trafficking. On the one hand, European society’s confrontation with pre-Columbian and African cosmologies, in which there were more than two sexes or more than two social roles, led the Christian colonisers to regard the multiple mobile polarities that went beyond the difference and hierarchy between man and woman, such as non-reproductive practices, or those without penis-vagina penetration, as ‘heresies’ or ‘sins’ that would first be punished by the Inquisition and later typified as sexual and psycho-pathological crimes, pathological forms of ‘hermaphroditism’ or ‘homosexuality’. On the other hand, before scientific notions became widely accepted, sexual difference as an administrative variable was applied to transactions for the sale of slaves because there the potential for reproduction was viewed as a means of producing supplementary value. Man and woman were, in the language of the plantation, commercial variables. Thus, as suggested by María Lugones, Elsa Dorlin and Oyèrónke Oyěwùmí, among many other voices, the modern notion of ‘sex’ appears constitutionally linked to the colonial notion of ‘race’, as are all processes of genetic manipulation, to produce a national ‘race’, which regulated the laws of racial discrimination and the prohibition of ‘mixed marriages’ until almost the 1960s.¹ Patriarchal-colonial biology is a branch of political economy.

The body never stopped changing and filling with more and more organs. Until the 16th century, before dissection became a common practice, the cellular or genetic processes of sexual reproduction were unknown and female anatomy was thought to comprise an internalised penis that could not produce life, but which simply served as a receptacle for a ‘homunculus,’ already contained in the man’s sperm, to develop. The legalisation of dissection produced more and more organs. Dissection changed the forms and names of the genitals. Other organs, other bodies were invented. In 1559, the Italian surgeon Matteo Realdo Colombo discovered the existence, between the labia of the vulva, of a ‘minuscule penis’ with no precise reproductive function, which he called the ‘clitoris’. However, since the possibility of its existence called into question the difference between external male genitalia and the uterus as an empty and available interiority, there was no recognition of the clitoris until almost the middle of the 20th century. The structure and workings of the Fallopian tubes were described in 1561. In 1677, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch textile merchant developed a passion for optical lenses and in his free time discovered, in a drop of his own semen, hundreds of ‘animalcules’, sperm cells that could not be mistaken for tiny human beings. But none of these ‘facts’ was sufficient to change the male paradigm in which female anatomy had no validity in itself. It was another two centuries before female anatomy was recognised as a sound and true variable, although women (and initially only white women) did not obtain political recognition until much later, between the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1827, Karl von Baer discovered the ovule; in 1842, Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli described the function of chromosomes and the exchange of genetic material between sperm and egg. The process of assignment through visual examination of the genitals was complicated, first, by the discovery, in 1905, of what became known as the sexual hormones and their impact on the external form of the body and reproductive cycles and, later, by the development of the DNA double helix model by Crick and Watson in 1953, and the recognition of increasingly complex chromosomal maps. In the 1950s, child psychiatrist John Money (and not the radical queer theories in favour of ‘gender ideology’, as the Catholic church and Trump’s government would have it) invented the notion of ‘gender’ in an attempt to save the epistemology of sexual difference. Aware of the impos- sibility of assigning a female or male sex to all newborn babies (the sex of between 1.7% and 2.5% of babies cannot be ascertained according to a binary system), John Money proposed that gender, unlike sex, is a social construct and can therefore be used as an adjustment variable to redirect the process of sexing a baby regarded as ‘intersexual’. With the help of surgery and hormones, Money proposed to reconstruct intersex babies’ bodies according to binary sexing. Soon after this, Henry Benjamin and David Oliver Cauldwell established the category of transexuality as a gender pathology and produced a series of protocols for hormonal and surgical reassignment, always aimed at stabilising and normalising sexual difference within a heteronormative framework. None of this is natural. None of this took place without semiotic-political struggles, nor without resistance from the very bodies that had been subjected to assignment and objectivisation. And they resisted, in an extreme paradox of somatic-politics, with the same body in which they had been both subjectivised and objectivised.

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