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Overview

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. Herculine Barbin became famous among academics long after her death, following French philosopher Michel Foucault's publication of her memoir. His interest — as well as his lengthy introduction to her memoir — authenticated the text for contemporary readers, marked it of interest, somehow integral to unraveling modern Western methods of. Herculine Barbin (November 8, 1838 February 13, 1868) was a French intersex person who was assigned female at birth and raised in a convent, but was later reclassified as male by a court of law, after an affair and physical examination. In 20th-century medical terms, she had male pseudohermaphroditism. Herculine is such a fabulous storyteller and her story is so heartbreakingly tragic but it grounds the concept of intersexuality into reality rather than most lore written about hermaphrodites which, as Foucault said, reduces intesexuality to myth.

French hermaphrodite, born in the eighteenth century with ambiguous genitalia and was consigned the female sex, named Adelaide-Herculine Barbin. She was usually called Alexina. Her father, a sabot maker, died some time early in her life and when she was age seven her destitute mother accepted the offer of a Mother Superior in a convent.

Herculine Barbin

Herculine Barbin (1838–1868) was a Frenchintersex person who was treated as a female at birth but was later redesignated a male after an affair and physical examination.

• Early life1
• Puberty2
• Reassignment as male3
• Death4
• Memoirs and modern commentaries5
• Commemoration6
• Sources and further reading7
• External links8

Early life

Most of what we know about Barbin comes from her later memoirs. Herculine Adélaîde Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d'Angély in France in 1838. She was regarded as a girl and raised as such; her family referred to her as Alexina. Her family was poor but she gained a charity scholarship to study in the school of an Ursuline convent.

According to her account, she had a crush on an aristocratic female friend in school. She regarded herself as unattractive but sometimes slipped into her friend's room at night and was sometimes punished for that. However, her studies were successful and in 1856, at the age of seventeen she was sent to Le Chateau to study to become a teacher. There she fell in love with one of the teachers.

Puberty

Although Barbin was in puberty, she had not begun to menstruate and remained flat chested. She would trim the hairs on her upper lip and cheeks which only made the hair thicker and more noticeable.

In 1857 Barbin received a position as an assistant teacher in a girl's school. She fell in love with another teacher, Sara, and Barbin demanded that only she should dress her. Her ministrations turned into caresses and they became lovers. Eventually rumors about their affair began to circulate.

Barbin, although sick her whole life, began to suffer excruciating pains. When a doctor examined her, he was shocked and asked that she should be sent away from the school, but she stayed.

Eventually, the devoutly Catholic Barbin confessed to Jean-François-Anne Landriot, the Bishop of La Rochelle. She asked him permission to break the confessional silence in order to send for a doctor to examine her. When Dr. Chesnet did so in 1860, he discovered that even if Barbin had a small vagina, she was bodily masculine and had a very small penis and testicles inside her body. In modern terms, she had 'male pseudohermaphroditism'.

Reassignment as male

A later legal decision declared official that Barbin was male. She left her lover and her job, changed her name to Abel Barbin and was briefly mentioned in the press. She moved to Paris where she lived in poverty and wrote her memoirs, reputedly as a part of therapy. In the memoirs, Barbin would use female pronouns when writing about her life prior to sexual redesignation and male pronouns following the declaration. Nevertheless, she clearly regarded herself as punished, and 'disinherited', subject to a 'ridiculous inquisition'.

Death

In February 1868, the concierge of Barbin's house in rue de l'École-de-Médecine found him dead in his home. He had committed suicide by inhaling gas from his coal gas stove. His memoirs were found beside his bed.

Memoirs and modern commentaries

Dr. Regnier reported the death, recovered the memoirs and performed an autopsy. Later he gave the memoirs to

Michel Foucault discovered the memoirs in the 1970s while conducting research at the French Department of Public Hygiene. He had the journals republished as Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite. In his edition, Foucault also included a set of medical reports, legal documents, and newspaper articles, as well as a short story adaptation by Oscar Panizza. It inspired the French film The Mystery of Alexina. and Jeffrey Eugenides in his book Middlesex treats concurrent themes, as does Virginia Woolf in her book, Orlando: A Biography. Judith Butler refers to Foucault's commentary on Barbin at various points in her 1990 Gender Trouble, including her chapter 'Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity.'

Barbin appears as a character in the play A Mouthful of Birds by Caryl Churchill and David Lan. Barbin also appears as a character in the play Hidden: A Gender by Kate Bornstein. Herculine, a full length play based on the memoirs of Barbin, is by Garrett Heater. Kira Obolensky also wrote a two-act stage adaptation entitled The Adventures of Herculina.

Commemoration

The birthday of Herculine Barbin is marked in Intersex Day of Remembrance on 8 November.

Sources and further reading

External links

• (French)Mes-souvenirsAdelaïde-Herculine Barbin, .
• Commentary about the memoirs in the PubMed Central.

• (Spanish) Herculine Barbin. Hermafroditismo y condena.

Herculine Barbin Summary

Herculine Barbin Sparknotes

Herculine Barbin Foucault