ABSTRACT
Unlike nineteenth-century science as examined in Michel Foucault’s study of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, the fl uidity and ambivalence of sexual identity in Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies describes a paradigm that calls univocal sexual truth into question, and that fi nds pleasure in dwelling upon the questionable margins of truth. The hermaphrodite that informs my reading of Twelfth Night derives from Ovid and the many Renaissance translations and reworkings of his myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. This is not the hermaphrodite as anatomical monster or scandalous prodigy, but rather the conventional literary fi gure that calls into question the body as the locus or ground of sexual truth. The hermaphrodite as metaphor defi es the doctors who would reduce its defi nition to anatomy. My feminist and psychoanalytic approach to the play will unravel what I call hermaphroditic anamorphism, the quality of being and simultaneously not being one sex; of being both male and female and therefore neither one nor the other.
