Hermaphrodite

Cet essai  contextualise l'autobiographie d'Adélaïde Herculine dite Alexina et devenue Abel Barbin (1838-1868) en la replaçant dans l'histoire de ce que les médecins ont appelé "les erreurs de sexe" qualifiant ainsi les personnes "hermaphrodites" présentant une discordance entre leur sexe biologique et leur sexe social au XIXe siècle.

En 1978, sous le titre Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B.  Michel Foucault éditait le journal d'une personne intersexe, Alexina Barbin, décédée en 1868. Le philosophe la nommait alors  –  comme cela se pratiquait aussi au XIXe siècle –  par le mot hermaphrodite. Dans la présentation du texte, il expliquait d'ailleurs qu'il avait l'intention de consacrer un volume de son Histoire de la sexualité aux hermaphrodites (Michel Foucault (ed.), Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B., Paris, Gallimard, 1978, p.133). Les volumes II et III publiés en 1984, avant l'édition posthume du IVe volume en 2018, ont finalement resserrés leur propos sur la période antique et les premiers temps du christianisme, mais par cette intention de recherche, le philosophe, pointait déjà un manque manifeste et peu noté jusque-là concernant l'histoire ignorée de toute une partie de la population.

Depuis les années 1970 les ouvrages parus sur le sujet se sont fait rares. Magali Le Mens vient combler ce manque et va même au-delà de l'histoire. C'est en effet en traitant des intersexes le sujet de façon interdisciplinaire qu’on arrive à mieux comprendre les enjeux qui se nouaient autant autour des personnes vivantes qu'autour des figures imaginées ou fantasmées. L'ouvrage Modernité hermaphrodite. Art, histoire, culture aborde près de deux siècles de l’histoire de ceux qu’on appelait jusqu’au début des années 2000 les hermaphrodites, qui, pour beaucoup, aujourd’hui préfèrent adopter la dénomination d’intersexes. Il commence au moment où pendant la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle les savants, anatomistes, philosophes, mythologues, artistes, littérateurs et érudits éclairés leur ont accordé un intérêt méthodique et symbolique particulier, et se termine au début du XXe siècle lorsqu’on a commencé à vouloir faire disparaître leurs anatomies sous les scalpels mutilant des chirurgiens.

Ce volume enrichi de 110 illustrations en couleur vient combler un manque dans l’histoire des personnes intersexuées. Jusqu’à présent, les ouvrages existants se concentraient uniquement sur l’aspect médical et biologique de leur histoire. Magali Le Mens propose de redonner une présence à cette population oubliée tout en abordant l’histoire binaire de la différence des sexes, pour mieux la dépasser.

The inscription known as ‘The Pride of Halikarnassos’ or ‘Salmakis inscription’ (late 2nd-early 1st cent. BC) provides a significant example of the self-representation of a late Hellenistic city as well as of the construction of its cultural memory. In particular, a historical and mythological analysis of lines 15-22 of the text – devoted to the myth of the local nymph Salmakis and the Greek hero Hermaphroditos – allows us to appreciate a refined process of reconstruction and reinterpretation of Halikarnassian history. Through the work of the anonymous poet, the city of Halikarnassos remodels the traditions and accounts that depict its foundation, and even remodels its real past, in order to shape a renewed mythical identity. In doing so, the city highlights the most prominent features of the local history, such as ethnic mixture and integration. The eponymous nymph Salmakis plays the major role in this process, representing the homonymous ancient community, territory and spring, whose historical role and importance remains alive in the memory of Hellenistic Halikarnassos.

This essay examines the ways in which the physical body served to both carry and mark differences that played out in the social and political realms.  The “unmarked” body seems the norm, unlimited in its potentiality; the body marked by “difference”—sex, age, debility—is limited in its potentiality.  I argue here that the bodily difference most important to medieval society was sex.  The physiology of the female body was decidedly different from that of the male body, and in some respects even more defining of “difference” than were the anatomical features that distinguished male from female.  I take issue with the thesis of Thomas Laqueur that medieval Europe was characterized by a “one-sex body” notion, the idea that male and female were on a single (and potentially reversible) continuum.  As noted, the physiological differences between male and female were understood to be profound, and they guided all basic concepts of medical thinking about basic gynecological disease.  Rather, following suggestions by Katharine Park, I point out that adoption of the Galenic homological discourse by surgeons in particular (not physicians generally) was a way to make up for their relative lack of information on female pelvic anatomy.  As surgeons began more and more to move into gynecological, and then obstetrical care, they analogized from male genital anatomy (which they knew well from many decades of increasingly sophisticated work on male hernias and other genital surgeries) to female anatomy.  “To deliver on such claims [to have gynecological and obstetrical expertise], they had to act as if they knew what they were doing.”  I also survey traditions of depicting the female body in medical contexts.  I also discuss so-called “male menstruation” (which in some cases was seen a salubrious hemorrhoidal bleeding) and hermaphroditism.  On the latter topic, I suggest that contrast between Islamic views and Christian ones is fruitful.  So, too, is consideration of uterine anatomy, which was founded on the idea that the human uterus is multi-celled, with the central one believed capable of producing hermaphrodites.

I then turn to paleopathology for assistance in assessing the ways in which physical debility—most importantly the classic disabling disease, leprosy—also “marked” individuals.  Surprisingly, physical disability seems not to have been the most common means of distinguishing people.  Still, in extreme situations, such distinction was done, a fact we see most striking in excavations from leprosaria, where the evidence suggests that those more severely (and visibly) affected by the disease were also those most like to be segregated.  After a quick glance at physiognomy, the actual science of essential discernment based on physical characteristics, and chiromancy, which focused on the hands, I turn to the “markings” allowed by dress, which could more readily be taken on or cast aside at will.

[Modern Greek; Supervisors: Konstantinos Spanoudakis, Charilaos Michalopoulos, Stelios Panayotakis]
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Résumé. Le présent article s’intéresse au procès livré contre un soi - disant hermaphrodite, Anne Grandjean, et principalement à la présentation des faits telle que le factum de l’avocat Vermeil les rappelle. A travers l’exposé des arguments de la défense, les enjeux philosophiques et anthropologiques apparaîtront. Nous avons à choisir le processus de l’identité sexuée soit via la perception en tiers et par les tiers, soit au regard de l’expérience vécue. Comme ces deux voies sont exclusives l’une de l’autre, elles ne sauraient apporter une seule et même réponse à cette difficile question : qu’est - ce que l’homme - si l’homme ne peut être homme que par la détermination sexuée ? Pour ces raisons, le statut de l’hermaphrodisme et le statut des discours sur l’hermaphrodisme posent inévitablement la question du statut de la casuistique.

L'opera di Alberto Savinio è stata spesso letta come un corpus multiforme ma sostanzialmente compatto, in cui gli elementi più significativi sembravano già tutti dati nel funambolico esordio di Hermaphrodito. Davide Bellini sceglie una prospettiva diversa, andando in cerca di sviluppi e discontinuità attraverso sondaggi testuali disposti su una traiettoria solidamente diacronica. Per farlo, collega l'analisi delle poetiche di Savinio (al plurale) con lo studio della sua biblioteca, in cui spicca il ruolo di alcune letture-chiave: innanzitutto quella, complessa e originale, di Nietzsche, ma anche dei classici italiani (Leopardi, Dante), della psicoanalisi freudiana, di saggisti politici come Spengler. Ne emerge un itinerario creativo che si snoda, con esiti spesso geniali, fra i due grandi orizzonti formali della "tragedia" e dell'" enciclopedia": privilegiando, da una parte, la suggestione per le insondabili profondità della metafisica, dall'altra il disincanto di un'intelligenza sempre pronta a far riemergere in superficie falsi miti e tabù.

The recent restoration works on the Hermaphrodite, preserved in the Museo Nazionale Romano and found in a niche in the peristyle of a domus dug out under the Opera Theatre in 1879, have revealed the presence of a mark made on the hidden surface of the piece. The marble turned out to be most probably Afyon, less probably Parian or Carrara, on the basis of archaeometric tests. This sculpture, probably from the Antonine age, is the most faithful copy of a statue from about the mid-second century BC, attributed to an artist influenced by Pergamenian or Rhodian styles and which represents an inadvertent tossing during the sleep of a hermaphrodite rendered in a particularly sensual and provocative pose.

Same-sex marriage, made legal in France by a vote of the National Assembly on 23 April 2013, has surprising judicial resonances in the nineteenth century. In fact, courts of that time repeatedly had to rule on requests for marriage annulment by husbands and wives complaining of having been deceived concerning the true sex of their spouses. The legal pretext – mistaken identity – was based on divergent interpretations of the sex of the offending spouse because of biological characteristics argued to be insufficiently clear to establish the sexual alterity required by the institution of marriage. 1 The focus of these trials, especially between 1816 and 1884 when divorce was impossible, was therefore to evaluate the degree of irregularity of genital formation, which might or might not call into question the legal sex of the accused spouse and thus the marriage. 2 Unusual and scandalous, these trials caused a great stir well beyond the localities in which they took place, as well as sparking open and sometimes heated debates between jurists and physicians. The judges, discomfited by cases that revolved around suspect genital organs, sometimes decided to appeal to medical expertise and to consider biological factors, even after legislators had expunged this possibility from the Civil Code of 1804. In effect, contrary to older law, the new Code – which at the request of the emperor Napoleon compiled laws pertaining to persons, property and relationships between private persons – abolished impotence as a definitive obstacle to marriage. 3 The magistrates thus encountered the growing interest of physicians in individuals whose morphology, physiology and behaviour complicated a clear division between the male and female sexes. Twenty-three such cases handled by French civil courts between 1808 – after the promulgation of the Civil Code – and 1903 – the date of a judgement of the Court of Cassation that set a long-lasting precedent in the matter – are examined here. Exhumed from court records, along with other traces of the lives of the protagonists whenever possible, they reveal men and women assaulted at the most intimate level under the harsh light of the courtroom, in the name of an exclusive binary definition

ARE THE CATEGORIES "man" and "woman" so obviously clear that they need no further explanation? Legislators throughout the nation in 1996 were trying to prevent the recognition of "gay marriage" contracted in other states obviously thought so. They introduced legislation that would grant official recognition only to marriages between "a man and a woman." This is an article from 1996 that was written to critique this kind of reasoning. The political message of the article is now outdated, because same-sex marriage is now legal throughout the United States, but the basic critique of binary gender classification remains a live issue today.

This article approaches Alberto Savinio’s multifaceted oeuvre by interpreting his avant-garde novel Hermaphrodito (1918) through its epistemological, linguistic, and political implications. Hermaphrodito challenges the identification between languages and peoples by radicalising Nietzsche’s etymological research begun in The Genealogy of Morals (1887). Through the autobiographical yet fantastic narrative of his ‘homecoming’ to his native Greece during World War I, Savinio reveals the neglected ontological multiplicity at the core of Western civilisation, questioning one of its fundamental myths – the original unity of languages represented by the world before the Tower of Babel, a world in which translation was not needed. While realising at the end of the novel that ‘home is the real enigma’, Savinio ventures into a linguistic territory where untranslatability defies what Derrida has named ‘the identificatory modality’ between the autobiographical ‘I’ and a singular mother tongue. Savinio’s own reappraisal of Hermaphrodito during World War II parallels his conversion to democratic ideas after a long self-imposed repression of his own diversity. His unorthodox prose illuminates the void of meaning behind the assumed stability of national narratives and gender divides.

This contribution retraces the literary work of Alberto Savinio (1891-1952), a prolific and nuanced  Author, in order to highlight his expressive abilities in shaping an immaginal macrocosm through a keen observation of the microcosm surrounding him.

This paper uses the life of George Joyce (later, Jane Joyce) as a case study to examine the presence of intersex people in mid-seventeenth-century England. Through the examination of extant documentary evidence, the study places Joyce's life in the wider context of seventeenth-century scientific understanding and legal treatment of 'hermaphrodites', as well as drawing on modern studies in order to more fully understand the extent to which her intersex condition may have affected Jane Joyce's life. The paper successfully builds the case that Jane Joyce was an intersex individual who parents believed her to have been misgendered at birth and who subsequently accepted that their son was really a daughter, and the consequences this had on Jane's development. The findings confirm the presence of  intersex conditions in the early modern period and contributes to a more comprehensive picture of a-typical sex characteristics in the wider historical context.

Floral anatomy of Peristethium leptostachyum (Loranthaceae). Peristethium leptostachyum is a hemiparasite species of the family Loranthaceae, distributed in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela and Panama. Previously treated as Struthanthus leptostachyus, the species was recently transferred to Peristethium together with other species of Cladocolea and Struthanthus. The present research describes the inflorescence and floral morphoanatomy of Peristethium leptostachyum, detailing the structure of the androe-cium and gynoecium and the processes of microgametogenesis and megagametogenesis, thus allowing comparison with Struthanthus and Cladocolea. Flowering material was collected in February and August 2012, in Santa María, Boyacá, Colombia. Histological sections were prepared and stained with astrablue-fuchsin and floral dis-sections were performed under a stereomicroscope. Peristethium leptostachyum shares inflorescence characters with Cladocolea (determinate inflorescence, ebracteate terminal flower), but also with Struthanthus (pairs of triads along the axis, deciduous bracts and actinomorphic flowers). The flowers of P. leptostachyum from Santa María are clearly hermaphrodites with androecium and gynoecium fully developed. This observation contradicts the description by Kuijt who reported this species to be dioecious. The androecium was observed to be similar to that of Struthanthus vulgaris, with a glandular tapetum and simultaneous microsporogenesis; in contrast, Cladocolea loniceroides has a periplasmodial tapetum and successive microsporogenesis. The gynoecium of P. leptostachyum, like that of Cladocolea, Struthanthus and Phthirusa, has a unilocular ovary with a mamelon and arquesporial tissue isoriented towards the style, which in turn is solid and amyliferous. Peristethium lep-tostachyum is similar to Cladocolea loniceroides and differs from Strutanthus vulgaris in presenting multiple embryo sacs and an unlignified pelvis (hipostase). The presence of a solid stylar canal is proposed as a synapo-morphy of the tribe Psittacanthinae. Given that P. leptostachyum shares characters with both Cladocolea and Struthanthus generic placement cannot be clearly determined on the basis of anatomical evidence. Phylogenetic studies that include representative species of all three genera are desirable to test hypotheses of monophyly. The sexual system observed here in P. leptostachyum is different from that reported by Kuijt and more studies are needed to identify the factors (geographic, ecological, etc.) that influence this variation. Rev. Biol. Trop. 64 (1): 341-352. Epub 2016 March 01.

In this investigation, I will analize the idea of the hermaphrodite, categorized by Sahagún in his work Historia General de las cosas de la Nueva España, as a kind of bad woman, considering that in the sixteenth century medical studies about individuals with both biological features had barely begun to be done. It seeks to generate a new discussion regarding how homosexuality was perceived by the nahuas, how this action was projected as a transgression and to compare feminine and the masculine because the conceptualization of each one generated, due to
hierarchical differences, a distinct rejection/tolerance contex for each of them. This will be done through the analysis of masculinity and femininity construction related to war and fertility in the mexica society and througt the analysis of teotipos pursued as man and woman ideals.

Cette étude se penche sur les discours des professionnels du droit de la France d’Ancien Régime sur l’hermaphrodisme pour cerner les réactions du système de justice face aux défis que représentait l’hermaphrodisme et ainsi circonscrire les constructions des définitions du masculin et du féminin. Nos recherches démontrent que les juristes de cette période ne pouvaient tolérer que des êtres puissent vivre sur la frontière étanche séparant juridiquement et socialement le féminin du masculin. Le système judiciaire, gardien du dimorphisme genré traditionnel de la société, se devait impérativement d’attribuer un genre juridique à tout individu ne cadrant pas avec l’idéal dichotomique de la France d’Ancien Régime. Par l’étude des six procédures pénales contre de prétendus hermaphrodites de cette période, nous démontrons que les experts juridiques de la France d’Ancien Régime établirent deux modèles distincts d’attribution d’un genre juridique à des individus à l’anatomie et au comportement ne cadrant pas avec les normes genrées de la période. Dans une première phase (1601 1661), les magistrats attribuaient un genre juridique selon l’apparence extérieure des parties génitales de l’individu. Dans une deuxième période (1686 1765), ces mêmes autorités attribuaient un genre juridique selon la fonctionnalité des organes génitaux et surtout, selon les capacités reproductrices théoriques de l’individu. Cette thèse expose aussi que les juristes français du XVIIIe siècle, suivant la jurisprudence développée par les magistrats du siècle précédent, ont criminalisé indirectement l’hermaphrodisme au moyen de crimes et délits inscrits dans les ordonnances du royaume en l’absence d’une législation royale sur la question. Cette étude offre une nouvelle compréhension de l’organisation sociale de la France d’Ancien Régime sous le prisme d’une histoire de la justice et du genre en illustrant les définitions de la masculinité et de la féminité dans les discours juridiques de professionnels du droit confrontés à l’hermaphrodisme et à l’ambiguïté anatomique.

Floral anatomy of Peristethium leptostachyum (Loranthaceae). Peristethium leptostachyum is a hemiparasite species of the family Loranthaceae, distributed in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela and Panama. Previously treated as Struthanthus leptostachyus, the species was recently transferred to Peristethium together with other species of Cladocolea and Struthanthus. The present research describes the inflorescence and floral morphoanatomy of Peristethium leptostachyum, detailing the structure of the androe-cium and gynoecium and the processes of microgametogenesis and megagametogenesis, thus allowing comparison with Struthanthus and Cladocolea. Flowering material was collected in February and August 2012, in Santa María, Boyacá, Colombia. Histological sections were prepared and stained with astrablue-fuchsin and floral dis-sections were performed under a stereomicroscope. Peristethium leptostachyum shares inflorescence characters with Cladocolea (determinate inflorescence,...