Queer Monsters

Michel Foucault and Herculine Barbin

Not a living creature was to share in the immense sorrow that seized me when I left my childhood, at that age when everything is young and bright with the future.

That age did not exist for me. As soon as I reached that age, I instinctively drew apart from the world, as if I had already come to understand that I was to live in it as a stranger.

— Herculine Barbin

Herculine Barbin became famous among academics long after her death, following French philosopher Michel Foucault's publication of her memoir. His interest — as well as his lengthy introduction to her memoir — authenticated the text for contemporary readers, marked it of interest, somehow integral to unraveling modern Western methods of pathologizing nonnormative bodies and pleasures. Her words have been deployed repeatedly since, by scholars as distinct (and distinguished) as Judith Butler, Ladelle McWhorter, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, on a diversity of topics — subalterity, gender performativity, disciplinary power, the medicalization of gender, and identity politics. The memoir has become a touchstone in contemporary queer, trans, and intersex scholarship. Because there are few autobiographical documents tracing the contours of intersex existence, particularly documents predating the emergence of intersex activism in the 1990s, Barbin's memoir is a work of great intellectual and historical import. My goal in this chapter is to map the way this memoir has been used in order to sketch a rough intellectual history of intersexuality. I center Michel Foucault's account of Barbin's work as it sets the terms of intellectual engagement, with later scholars elaborating upon, problematizing, and critiquing his analysis. I seek answers to the following questions: what have we collectively learned from Barbin? What promise does her text hold? Why have so many folks — myself included — been so intensely interested in her life story?

But first the facts: in 1838 Alexina Herculine Barbin was born into poverty in Saint-Jean-d'Angély, France. Upon birth, she was designated as female. She received an Ursuline convent school education thanks to a charitable scholarship. In 1856 she left the convent to begin training to become a teacher. Upon completion of this training in 1857, she received a post as an assistant teacher at a girl's school. It was at this post that she fell in love with Sara, a fellow teacher. She began experiencing sharp abdominal pains. A doctor was sent to the school to examine Barbin, and upon this examination it was discovered that she possessed a sex-atypical — that is, intersex — body. The visiting doctor argued that Barbin should, on account of this atypicality, be forced to leave the all-female realm of the school. She did not do so. In 1860, however, Barbin confessed the details of her situation to the Catholic bishop of the La Rochelle diocese, where the school was located. After hearing Barbin's account, he advised her to flee the school and begin a nun's life. He also ordered another medical examination, this time performed by one Dr. Chesnet. This medical examination heralded a decisive verdict: Barbin was not a woman but a malformed man, replete with partially descended testicles in a divided (thus, labial-appearing) scrotum and supposedly possessed of the capacity to produce sperm. Upon receipt of Chesnet's report, the bishop rescinded his initial advice and set about creating the circumstances that would enable a gender transition for Barbin, allowing the newly ordained male Barbin to assume a properly male station in life. This transition was also geographical — Barbin moved to Paris, embarking upon a life of poverty due to his poor training in the prototypically male professions, unable to fruitfully utilize his training as a teacher. In 1868 he was found dead in his rooms in the rue de l'École-de-Medécine. He had committed suicide by inhaling gas from his stove. His memoir was left near his bed. This memoir was published in a French medical journal in 1874 under the title "La question médico-légale de l'identité dans les rapports avec las vices de conformation des organes sexuels" ("The Medical/Legal Issue of Identity in Relation to Irregular Formation of the Sexual Organs"), enframed by and published at the behest of French medical doctor and forensic scientist Auguste Ambrose Tardieu. This journal was unearthed by Foucault in the mid-1970s, presumably while he was doing research for the proposed multivolume History of Sexuality. The first volume of The History of Sexuality appeared in 1976. Foucault's edition of Barbin's memoir appeared in 1978, with a preface by Foucault himself and a dossier including a timeline, newspaper reports on Barbin's case, the medical reports filed by both Dr. Chesnet and one E. Goujon, the doctor who performed Barbin's autopsy, as well as a short story inspired by Barbin's life entitled "Scandal at the Convent," written by German psychiatrist and author Oskar Panizza in 1893. All of this was collected under the title Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite.

It was a deceptively straightforward story. As is the case with all simple narratives, a significant amount of excision and reduction — of emotion, of ideological complexity, of historicity, of subjective specificity — has taken place in order to render this series of intellectually digestible, ostensibly factic pronouncements. In presenting this tight narrative, I am deliberately mimicking the logic enacted by the disciplinary agents — doctors, priests, judges — whose diagnoses and pronouncements forcibly shaped and constrained Herculine's life; I engage this mimicry in order to accentuate the difference between these official logics — those that decree everyone must have a true sex and that this sex must be either male or female — from those alternative, minoritarian logics at work in the autobiographical record left by Herculine, who consistently disidentified with binary schemes of gender, and the medical and juridical systems that supported and enforced such notions. Disidentification refers to the practice of utilizing the codes of dominant culture as "raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture," and thus fashioning a self that is situated both within and against those normative cultural discourses and modes of belonging. It is a tactic Barbin deploys repeatedly, in relation to maleness and...