ABSTRACT
With these words Michel Foucault opened his famous study of sexual identity based on the memoirs of Herculine Barbin (Foucault 1980), also known as Alexina, Camille, and Abel. It is a brief and compelling account of the life of a hermaphrodite, but also an exposé of juridico-medical classifications and our cultural fascination with category. In the case of Herculine those pronouncements had disastrous effects resulting in suicide. Apart from our current preoccupation in all matters sexual, the story of this Herculine is important for it belies the rigidity of Western taxonomizing, especially where it concerns identity, be it race, class, gender, or sexual preference. That rigidity necessitates that all individuals be neatly pigeonholed and categorized according to a set of predetermined labels. So too in our archaeological investigations we have concentrated on single-issue questions of identity, focusing singularly on gender or ethnicity, and have attempted to locate people from antiquity into a priori Western taxonomies: heterosexual/homosexual, male/female, elite/non-elite, etc. Archaeologists tend to concentrate on specific sets of issues that coalesce around topics like gender, age, or status, without interpolating other axes of identity, be they class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation for example, because this has been seen as too vast or complex a project. As Sarah Nelson (1997: 16) recently commented, while feminists have been discussing other variables such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and the other ways people are categorized, ‘everything cannot be studied at once’. This is where the generations divide. Being feminists it is surely part of our project to open up the debate to all those vectors of difference by which individuals are named and subjectified. Following Sawicki (1991: 47), ‘theoretical pluralism makes possible the expansion of social ontology, a redefinition and redescription of experience from the perspectives of those who are more often simply objects of theory’. Without such sensitivities we run the risk of doing interpretive violence in representing the people of the past and, by seamless extension, those imbricated in present-day struggles.
