Unnatural History: Gender and Genealogy in Gerald of Wales's Topographia Hibernica

Right in the middle of his argument in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Michel Foucault makes the astonishing proposition that language has the power to alter the fundamental conditions of Nature. Inasmuch as cultural discourses—and moral injunctions in particular—are geared toward regulating the performance of bodily acts, the physical strains involved in practicing or repressing certain behaviors produce physiological changes within individual bodies. These anatomical mutations are then passed down to subsequent generations as inherited traits until an entire lineage or even a whole race has taken on the same set of induced characteristics. In Foucault's original conception of genealogical descent, therefore, ideas are not just transmitted culturally and institutionally, they actually imbed themselves within bloodlines. "Finally," he writes, "descent attaches itself to the body. It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate body of those whose ancestors committed errors. Fathers have only to mistake effects for causes, believe in the reality of an 'afterlife,' or maintain the value of eternal truths, and the bodies of their children will suffer." 1 For Foucault, as for Nietzsche before him, cultural discourses are responsible for inhibiting organic development and stunting human growth, but to take Foucault literally at his word, variations between different belief systems can be used to explain why one segment of a population or race of people diverges from another with respect to their physical attributes. 2 By compartmentalizing humanity into different social and ethnic groups along genealogical lines, Foucault seeks to trace the development of various moral values and belief systems as they come to be expressed in different racial embodiments. This racialized concept of genealogy succeeds in undermining the notion of Nature as a unified and universal whole, for if human culture has the ability to effect real, material transformations within the domain of [End Page 29] Nature, then different cultures are capable of producing substantively different human natures.