ABSTRACT
Let me start this chapter with a story, about Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century French ‘hermaphrodite’, as told by her/himself, and offered to the world by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1980b). Herculine was born in the French provinces in the mid-nineteenth century, with an indeterminate gender – that is she had organs of both sexes. She was brought up in a largely all-female world by nuns, and known as Alexina, in a context where her ambiguous status did not seem to matter. She lived, as Foucault (1980b: xiii) comments, ‘the happy limbo of a non-identity’. But this was a period in European history, the 1860s and 1870s, when identity, as man or woman, as heterosexual or homosexual, was beginning to matter in a new and forceful way. In particular, it began to matter to the authorities, and especially to the legal and medical professions, that here was someone who did not easily fit into the categories of gender and sexuality that were being
newly refined and redefined. Authority wanted something more neat and tidy. Alexina was officially re-categorized as a man, Abel. After a few years of trying to live unhappily as a male, Abel committed suicide.
