ABSTRACT
This chapter brings attention to the way queer lives are framed across languages, cultures, and historical periods by focusing on the complicated transnational, and translational, publishing history of the memoir of the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin. Barbin’s French memoir was first published in 1872 as part of a volume edited by the sexologist Ambroise Tardieu. In 1978, Gallimard issued a new version of the memoir, presented by Michel Foucault, which did not include Tardieu’s introductory essay and annotations to the memoir and replaced Tardieu’s title Histoire d’Alexina B. with the somewhat enigmatic Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B. Two years later, an English “translation” would appear, published by Pantheon Books, with the elaborate title: Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. This edition opens, not with Barbin’s memoir like the Gallimard edition, but with a ten-page introduction by Foucault, which begins with the question: “Do we truly need a true sex?” (1980, vii). The publication history of Barbin’s memoir challenges notions of a fixed “original,” raises questions of cultural capital related to the visibility of Foucault, and reveals how queer life stories are transformed and localized in translation.
