The Independent on “intersexuality”, Herculine Barbin

Sarah Leaver: A 34-year-old playwright and actress from Brighton, Sarah is currently staging an adaptation of the memoirs of the 19th-century French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin. Although her chromosomal make-up, or karyotype, is XX (female), six years ago she discovered that she was born with an internal male testicle, which was removed when she was two years old without her knowledge or that of her parents. [Caption from The Guardian]

Recent piece by The Guardian The Independent mentions the play by Sarah Leaver based on Herculine Barbin:

The actress and playwright Sarah Leaver is also using art “to expose what lives between the lines”. Her play, Memoirs of a Hermaphrodite, currently running at London’s Oval House Theatre, tells the true story of Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century intersexed Parisian whose musings were published by the French philosopher-sociologist Michel Foucault in 1980. Barbin began life as a girl, but faced misunderstanding and contempt when she fell in love with another woman, and was later discovered to have both male and female genitalia. Forced to become a man, she descended into depression and poverty, and died in tragic circumstances.

Thankfully, Leaver’s own tale is far happier. “I’ve always felt in between the genders,” she says. “As a kid I wore boy’s pants, played football, and ran around with my top off.” Having supportive parents meant this was rarely an issue, and it was only in her teens and twenties that she started to question her identity: “I didn’t feel I was in the wrong body, but I knew there was something that made me different.”

Six years ago, after watching a documentary on intersexuality, she asked her GP to check her medical history. It transpired that an operation she’d had as a toddler in 1977 to remove a “hernia” had in fact been to remove a male gonad – but neither she nor her parents had ever been informed. “It was like finding the missing piece in a jigsaw,” she recalls. “Part of me was relieved, and part of me was really angry. Why had the doctors hidden this from me?”

Despite her anger, Leaver, who is now 34, regards herself as pretty fortunate. Her condition – she hasn’t yet sought a specific diagnosis – is at the mild end of the intersex spectrum, as she has XX chromosomes, ovaries and periods, and has experienced few health problems.

Through the play, she’s turned her frustration into “a force for change”, and hopes others will do the same: “More and more people are speaking out about being intersexed, and the time feels right for celebrating and embracing our differences; not hiding them away.”

Sexuality and solitude: Foucault and Sennett

You’ve read the piece known as Sexuality and Solitude by Foucault (DE 295) which begins:

In a work consecrated to the moral treatment of madness and published in 1840, a French psychiatrist, Louren*, tells of the manner in which he treated one of his patients – treated and of course, as you may imagine, cured. One morning he placed Mr A., his patient, in a shower-room. He makes him recount in detail his delirium. ‘But all that,’ said the doctor, ‘is nothing but madness. Promise me not to believe in it any more.’ The patient hesitates, then promises. ‘That is not enough,’ replies the doctor. ‘You have already made me similar promises and you haven’t kept them,’ And he turns on the cold shower above the patient’s head. ‘Yes, yes! I am mad!’ the patient cries. The shower is turned off; the interrogation is resumed. ‘Yes. I recognise that I am mad,’ the patient repeats. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘I recognise it because you are forcing me to do so.’ Another shower. ‘Well, well,’ says Mr A., ‘I admit it. I am mad, and all that was nothing but madness.’

*See footnote a in Ethics: subjectivity and truth, edited by P. Rabinow.

This text has appeared in various forms (the one in J. Carrette’s Religion and culture is the best since it is a variorum) but as far as I know the complementary piece by novelist and author Richard Sennett, originally published alongside Foucault in the London Review of Books in May 1981, has not appeared.

With the reorganisation of the LRB website recently in honor of their 30th anniversary, this text is now very easy to read (sub. req’d).

An extract:

A few years ago, Michel Foucault and I discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem is why sexuality has become so important to people as a definition of themselves. Sex is as basic as eating or sleeping, to be sure, but it is treated in modern society as something more. It is the medium through which people seek to define their personalities, their tastes. Above all, sexuality is the means by which people seek to be conscious of themselves. It is that relationship between self-consciousness, or subjectivity, and sexuality that we want to explore. Few people today would subscribe to Brillat-Savarin’s ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,’ but a translation of this dictum to the field of sex does command assent: know how you love, and you will know who you are.

Michel Foucault and I are working, as I say, on two very different historical periods in which this theme of self-consciousness via sexuality appears. He focuses on how Christianity in its early phases, from the third to the sixth century, assigned a new value to sexuality, and redefined sexuality itself. I focus on the late 18th and 19th centuries, and within that period on how medical doctors, educators and judges took a new interest in sexuality.

There is also a letter, a few issues later in 1981 from a certain William Milne, identified as a professor at Newcastle Upon Tyne who says:

Michel Foucault sternly claims that he is not a structuralist. If this is the case, can he please explain to a layman what he means exactly by ‘technologies of the self’? And why no citations from women themselves? And why no analysis of sado-masochism? Nietzsche’s aphorism, ‘Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip,’ tells us more about recent history surely than the theories of Tissot and Boerhaave, or, come to that, the obsessively self-centred memoirs of Casanova, ever can.

Sennett then offers a final series of remarks centering around Tissot’s Onania (1758):

Tissot set in motion three attitudes about auto-eroticism that profoundly influenced medical and educational opinion later in the 18th and throughout the 19th century: sexuality in solitude is, first, profoundly arousing; auto-eroticism is, secondly, the condition in which a person is most aware of him or herself. To be both sexually aroused and self-aware, alone, is, thirdly, dangerous: the body is on the road to madness and the soul on the road to perdition. What is important about Tissot’s legacy, and about the phenomenon of auto-eroticism generally in the 19th century, is that through the prism of auto-eroticism authorities attempted to understand eroticism itself. Armed with these three assumptions, researchers set out to try and understand sexuality. Rather than considering people making love together as constituting a domain of knowledge about which the doctor would learn, the notion was to separate the individual and to study him by himself, because it was in isolation that the person felt his sexuality most strongly. It was an application to the study of sex of other forms of 19th-century individualism, this assumption that a person was to be considered as an isolated individual.

Two items: sex SF and Galilée

Two quick items today:

Gai pied hebdo (a name supposedly suggested by Foucault and a pun on guêpier or hornet’s nest according to Wikipedia; hebdo = “weekly” in French) published an interview with MF “Friendship as a way of life” (DE #293). Sex SF, a blog from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, has a piece about this interview today and how you can download the interview (and lots of other stuff, most of it in a legal grey zone) from aaaarg.org.

Philosophy in a time of error blog compares the Derrida lecture series to the Foucault ones, and claims:

I don’t think we’ll see the breakthrough in studies on Derrida from the publication of these lectures as we did with the publication of Foucault’s courses. For me, there was the Foucault before the lectures were published and the much more interesting Foucault after the lectures. Not that there isn’t a link between the two, but Foucault’s work in the lectures offers less totalizing views of the periods under discussion and it’s much more experimental. A lot of Derrida’s lectures have already been published and though I’ve seen some good stuff at the archives in Irvine, I don’t think you’ll see the massive onslaught of publications that greeted a lot of Foucault lectures’ publication.

He also wants to know when the next book is coming out. Any ideas?

Update. 500th post! Incroyable.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

As many readers of this blog are likely to know, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died a few days ago.  Here’s the obit from the New Yorker:

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died in New York yesterday, at the age of fifty-eight, following a long battle with breast cancer. The literary critic, who taught most recently at the CUNY Graduate Center, is best known for her formative work in the field of queer theory (in the books “Between Men” and “Epistemology of the Closet”), including a number of provocative—and often scandalous—readings of classic literary texts.

There’s also a short note in Inside Higher Ed, with links to her wikipedia page.

Beyond lust

Fig leaf for Michelangelo’s David (made especially for Queen Victoria’s visits)

Review of a “brilliant” new exhibition called Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to the Present at the Barbican until January 27.

Is art ever about anything else, asks Jonathan Jones in his review? An interesting and unusually relaxed discussion.

More pics after the break.

When popular culture confirms anthropology!

I haven’t said anything about the case of Senator Larry Craig, but I think this Salon article has it right concerning sexual orientation. You can be MSM without being “gay.” I’m not an anthropologist but surely they have right: the binary categories of sexuality are inadequate.

I used to live in Midtown Atlanta, which had been known since the 1960s for prostitution and gay prostitution, since much in decline. Yet you could still see cars pulling up, driven by men, probably from the suburbs, many I’m sure with families. And the men would pick up male prostitutes for sex, returning some time later. But hey, they weren’t gay:

When Idaho Sen. Larry Craig says, “I’m not gay,” I believe him. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t cruising for sex last June when he was arrested in a bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport on charges of disorderly conduct. Surely any homosexual worth his capri pants saw the loopholes in Craig’s televised declaration of non-gayness, amplified by the presence of his wife. Even some straight folks, wised up after the scandals of Ted Haggard and Mark Foley, must have noted that Craig did not add a qualifying phrase like, “Nor am I bisexual,” “I’ve never had sex with a man” or even one of those oldies but goodies like, “Doing what I did doesn’t make you gay,” “I was so drunk!” or “I’m only queer for some guys.”

Intersex case studies

Interesting discussion of intersex with case studies (including Herculine Barbin).

The Western world defines gender in two distinct categories. But in reality, gender is a spectrum. Why does society, and even science, struggle to understand and accept those who are somewhere between male and female?

“Did Foucault invent fisting?”

“Did Foucault invent fisting?”

This was a question I was once asked by an anthropology student in our department. I quote it today because it’s symptomatic of the often legendary or rumor-laden mythology that sometimes surrounds Foucault’s private life, particularly when it comes to sex and homosexuality.

By way of commenting on the story that the University of Michigan is thinking of changing its gay support group name to be more inclusive (as predictably decried by Andrew Sullivan here) this guy offers us the following potted history of the politics of homosexuality, concluding:

Then, Saint Michel Foucault happened on the scene with his death from AIDS in 1984. Foucault’s original claim to fame was Archeology of Knowledge, published in 1971. He lectured at U.C. Berkeley as a visiting professor during the Radical Sixties, crossing into San Francisco’s Miracle Mile of S&M extremism. He and his lover back in Paris seemed quite “ordinary,” but according to Edmund White, Foucault “turned into a S&M slave” for other S&M leather men to gang fist him while trashing Folsom Street’s more derelict bathhouses and backrooms. According to White, Foucault did not contract AIDS by being fisted or wasted (he sure could have, Edmund).

While “intellectually” a historian by profession, Foucault ventured into some provocative areas with his corpus, indicting penology, psychology, and criminalization of aberrant behavior. While few read his most promising work of 1971, many became enmeshed with his relational ontology of binary differences, male/female, straight/queer, sadist/masochist, gay/lesbian, etc. And since many gays and lesbians major in English language and literature, this Postmodern bullshit from France is the elite nonsense de jour. Ironically, Foucault is not a Postmodernist, but a structuralist, from which springs his Relational Ontology in a schizo-affective, S/M binary sort of way.

I only quote this rubbish extensively in order to make the point that some people seem all too happy to pass comment on work that they have a stunning unfamiliarity with. Also to point out that this is another example of something I’ve noted before, that Foucault is simultaneously not read (eg., “no one reads him any more”), and yet exerts a massive influence on the gullible.

No one is forced to read Foucault (or to like his work) but it seems to me that if you’re going to offer forceful opinions (“bullshit,” and whatever a schizo-affective “relational ontology” is supposed to be) you might want to know more about him than whatever Edmund White said of him in a couple of sentences.

The phenomena of Christian blogs

One of the purposes of this blog stated at the outset was to cover the many ways in which Foucault is worked through on a daily basis. Without resorting to academic expositions of positions long held, what are the everyday ways in which Foucault is taken up, disputed and used?

This has been a learning experience for me too. One of the surprises for me (which in retrospect seems obvious now) is the interest in Foucault from self-identified Christian blogs (I’ve linked to them before).

Edmund White

Edmund White on Foucault:

Foucault could speak English wonderfully well, but his success with the language was a sustained performance demanding complete concentration, the sort of intensity that made his seminars in the States so exhilarating (and exhausting).

I’d attend a seminar at New York University in 1982 and I remembered how much Foucault had had to rely on written notes and words precisely produced by a mouth glittering with silver fillings, as though the metal helped him to chew out the difficult foreign words.