The Eunuch Archive is an online community of individuals with exceptional interest in castration and penectomy. Here we examine themes related to genital ablation in a sample of fictional stories posted by members of the Eunuch Archive. Similarities between the contents of these stories and members' demographic information were found, suggesting that these stories may reflect some of the members' life experiences or personal fears. Common themes in both stories and personal histories of voluntarily castrated men were homosexuality, childhood abuse, and threats of castration. Writing these stories may be therapeutic for the authors, as some members have claimed that writing them has allowed them to work through their extreme castration ideations without acting on them. The term eunuch refers to a man who has been castrated, either chemically or surgically.

This article examines stories of men who gelded themselves in early modern England. These events, it argues, were shaped and partly motivated by a culture in which castration was seen as both degrading and potentially empowering. Religious precedents such as that of Origen of Alexandria framed self-gelding as a foolhardy activity, but one which nevertheless indicated an impressive degree of mastery over the body and its urges.

The seventh-century Visigothic Code called for sodomites to be castrated. It numbers among the civic punishments luridly illustrated in the bas-de-page of a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Coutemes de Toulouse. This is all, I trust, distressing, but none of it is particularly surprising, especially if we approach these cases, as is almost inevitable, under the influence of psychoanalytic storytelling. There is no need to take this narrative literally to recognize its operations across a host of relations in which castration, or symbolically analogous harms, become, as they are in my first paragraph, the sign of the ultimate humiliation, and its threat and practice what bonds dominant groups. For at least with the celibate Christian clergy of the Middle Ages, the promotion of chastity and bodily mortification meant that the possession of the male genitalia, not their loss, was the dilemma.