St Barbara, the Severed Breast, and the Problem of Pious Pornography

In recent years critics have argued that hagiography provides a doctrinally licit forum for visualizing and memorializing representations of the naked female body. Characterized as phallically charged objects of power and desire, implements of coercion and torture displace the act of rape while procedures of scopic objectification transform the saintly victim into a locus of voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure. The male observer is figured by implication as a potential rapist in the hagiographic plot. Yet, how watertight is this thesis, and for whose benefit is the gaze sexualized? Perhaps more fundamentally, can an issue as complex as gender be fully and properly understood in a critical vacuum that excludes representations of the naked male subject? Is it really true that all male observers approach Barbara’s forced mastectomy by raping her with their eyes, or can theories of alterity be exploited as a hermeneutic for the development of a more nuanced and culturally sensitive approach towards the problem of sexualized violence? If so, what specifically could be said about the unique socio-cultural characteristics of early Iberian society and the mechanisms of narrative elaboration embraced by artists in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century retable?