May 25, 2026: After eleven years, I have moved this article to Medium. It's paywalled there. Thank you, thirty thousand people who have viewed this. If you pay $5/month to Medium, you can read my article (and millions more by everyone who writes there).
Detail of Ethiopian painting commemorating the Battle of Adwa, Catalogue No. E261845-0, Department of Anthropology, NMNH, Smithsonian Institution. Photo by Joshua Sherurcij, 2007.
My books
If you are interested in castrated villains in fiction, please check out Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains. If you are interested in the Western literary treatment of castration in history, please check out Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty. Both are by Tucker Lieberman.
Related
If you're interested in gender in African militaries, please see also:
"Reaching further back in history, from the 17th to 19th centuries, there was the female regiment in the Kingdom of Dahomey in Africa. Europeans called them the “Dahomey Amazons.” They were fierce, ruthless, and merciless." (Fay Wylde)
Dahomey was a West African kingdom until 1904, in what is today the Republic of Benin.
