ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the story of Herculine Barbin, a French hermaphrodite living in the nineteenth century whose ambiguously sexed body ultimately led to suicide, in order to reflect upon the relationship between the embodied and speaking aspects of the human subject. The Lacanian notion of an imaginary anatomy suggests that the self originates with the creation of a psychical map of bodily integrity in the context of loved others. The journal of Herculine Barbin is the first-person account of a hermaphrodite's struggles to survive in nineteenth century France. Julia Epstein, in an article on sexual ambiguity and the ideology of gender, suggests that the anatomically ambiguous individual is perceived as threatening because it poses epistemological challenges to definitions of natural boundaries and to the very notion of gender clarity itself. Feminists, among others, have begun to theorize the constitution and reconstitution of sexed (especially sexed as female) bodies.
