With an eye for the sensual bloom of young
schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels
of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life
as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at
birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a
bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies
of her classmates, a passionate lover of another
schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man.
Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of
thirty in a miserable attic in Paris.Here, in an erotic
diary, is one lost voice from our sexual past.
Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she
imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of
scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to
our own notions of sexuality. Michel Foucault, who
discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French
Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the
graphic medical descriptions of Herculine's body before
and after her death. In a striking contrast, a painfully
confused young person and the doctors who examine her
try to sort out the nature of masculine and feminine at
the dawn of the age of modern sexuality.''Herculine
Barbin can be savored like a libertine novel. The
ingenousness of Herculine, the passionate yet equivocal
tenderness which thrusts her into the arms, even into
the beds, of her companions, gives these pages a charm
strangely erotic...Michel Foucault has a genius for
bringing to light texts and reviving destinies outside
the ordinary.''Le Monde, July 1978 |
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