Abstract
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hermaphroditism was considered a deviation or departure from the law of nature, and in order to restore nature’s intention, intersexed persons were forced into choosing a binary sex in order to curtail the threat that their indeterminacy posed to social and civil order. For the broader period, intersex bodies were contested sites; they resisted gender binary and heteronormative constructs which were essential to social functioning. This essay examines case studies that emerged in the period, uncovering the limits and extremes of gender embodiment. It illuminates non-binary people whose bodies confounded science; demonstrates the cultural threat intersex bodies represented in this period; and then examines the medical treatises that sought to “normalise” these “monstrous” bodies. My larger aim is to highlight historical intersex cases and demonstrate how they symbolised the socio-scientific reimagining of bodily boundaries, helping us question, resituate, and reconfigure our current culture’s boundaries and margins.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay uses historical terms such as hermaphrodite, as well as current terminology such as intersex (and medical terms such as gender-atypical anatomy). In order to better encompass current gender identification terms, which are appropriately in flux, it also uses non-binary and genderqueer.
- 2.
For a fuller discussion of eighteenth-century teratology, see Epstein, “Either/Or,” especially pages 113-18 and Thomas Laqueur’s chapter “Discovery of the Sexes” (149-92). For a helpful overview of early androgynous history see Leah DeVun.
- 3.
For further discussion of Foucault and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sexuality, see Zigarovich, “Gothic.”
- 4.
The phrase “female husband” was first used in a broadside about a person thought to be intersex, The Male and Female Husband (1682). Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband: or, the surprising history of Mrs. Mary, alias Mr. George Hamilton (1746), is a fictionalised account of a person assigned female at birth but who lived as a man and entered into legal marriage with a woman. Manion provides an insightful account of British and American stories of this particular trans experience during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, with the growing interest in queer and trans historiography, scholars such as Manion, Rachel Mesch, and Ula Klein are recovering biographical accounts, histories, and cultural contexts of female husbands, cross-dressers, and trans and non-binary people. While it acknowledges this important work, this essay takes a different approach by curating treatises and case histories for comparative import.
- 5.
This is when we are clearly seeing the modern legal concerns the hermaphrodite inspires in the period. For an insightful analysis of period treatises, see Mann.
- 6.
See Laqueur’s argument in Making Sex. Subsequently, numerous studies have questioned and troubled Laqueur’s account that a two-sex model of sex was invented in the late eighteenth century. For a helpful assessment of this debate, see King.
- 7.
See also Johnston for a fascinating history of the bearded woman and her circulation in theatre.
- 8.
Liébault’s Trois Livres Book 3, Chapter 12, discusses Phaethousa of the Epidemics. Chapter 13 discusses hermaphrodites.
- 9.
McCormick cites popular sourcebooks for monstrous births that influenced the hermaphrodite treatise such as Paré’s Monstres et Prodiges (1573) [Monsters and Prodigies, 1634] and Aristotle’s Masterpiece. For the American medical history of monstrous births, see Reis.
- 10.
I am indebted to Thompson’s “Question of Gender.”
- 11.
Though not the subject of this essay, I wish to acknowledge that there is a recurring thread of Africanness (especially regarding female sexuality) and the history of hermaphroditism. See Thompson and Long.
- 12.
Jacob cites ancient and early modern examples of these “heathens,” such as Hierenimus Cardanus and Leo Africanus, but many of his examples are summarised and authors are not cited.
- 13.
McCormick’s Sexual Outcasts anthologises numerous treatises on hermaphroditism and other genital differences. Gilbert provides an excellent eighteenth-century historiography and challenges Foucault’s notion that there was ever “free choice.”
- 14.
Carol A. B. Warren discovered Brand’s pamphlet at the University of Kansas. See her excellent analysis of Brand’s medical opinion and its socio-cultural implications in “Gender Reassignment Surgery in the 18th Century: A Case Study.” While my essay does not fully discuss class, Warren exposes that Brand’s patient and their parents came from the Soho Dispensary for the Poor, indicating that they were working class. Brand concludes that a “better” patient–a “child of rank” would give the case more interest and significance. See Warren 882-3, Brand 8.
- 15.
Reactions to Brand’s pamphlet can be found in The English Review (69-70). The Monthly Review states that “the case here is uncommon” (674).
- 16.
For a helpful analysis of Drouart’s case, see Hilger.
- 17.
The digital version of Vacherie’s account available through Eighteenth-Century Collections Online does not include Michael-Anne’s portrait.
- 18.
Thompson notes that the “determination” by some that Michael-Anne was female likely had to do with her upbringing as a girl (398), and Thompson refers to Drouart with female pronouns. Since in many historical cases current scholars can’t verify the sex and gender identification of the ambiguous or fluid, I prefer to use a plural pronoun for Drouart.
- 19.
For the American perspective, see Reis.
- 20.
In fact, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s conflation of queer sexual orientation and transgender identity and expression became part of the scientific foundation that informed cisnormative and heteronormative standards not only in medicine and the law, but in the popular imagination. Underlying the landmark taxonomic study Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) is Krafft-Ebing’s assumption that “any departure from procreative heterosexual intercourse represents a form of emotional or physical disease” (Stryker 21). German pathologist Albrecht Edwin Klebs’s classification system, like Krafft-Ebing’s, sought to decrease the “actual” and “true” cases of hermaphroditism by requiring the presence of at least one ovary and testicle. In addition to Krafft-Ebing, sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and later Freud present case studies that are novelistic in their descriptions and explanations, provocatively narrativising transgender, intersex, and homosexual phenomena.
- 21.
For a discussion of period case studies and their influence on the work of writers such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, see Zigarovich “Transing Wilkie Collins.”
- 22.
Ernest “Stella” Boulton and Frederick “Fanny” Park were arrested at the Strand Theatre in London in women’s attire, charged by the Metropolitan Police for “conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence.” Description of the arrest (from which this quote is taken) is detailed in several newspapers, including The Days’ Doings, 20 May 1871, and the Pall Mall Gazette, 31 May 1870. See Carriger and McKenna.
- 23.
See Collins for a discussion of Victorian gender teratology and hermaphroditism. Bedenbaugh examines how Julia Ward Howe’s novel is influenced by science and culture that attempt to expel the abnormal body.
- 24.
From Certificates of a Very Rare Specimen of Hermaphroditism.
- 25.
A larger discussion of these cases can be found in Zigarovich, “‘Strange and Startling.’”
- 26.
See also Mak’s study of Vay’s juridical case files.
- 27.
The history of the hermaphrodite’s legal punishment is lengthy. One of the most famous early modern cases is that of Marie/Marin le Marcis, a French hermaphrodite put on trial for sodomy. See Mann. As hermaphrodites became increasingly policed, they would stand trial for transgressions such as cross-dressing and sodomy. Not trusting their testimony as to their predominate sex, doctors and jurists often made the decision on their behalf (as we see much later in Barbin’s case). See especially the work of Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, including “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature.”
- 28.
Pseudohermaphroditism comprises a range of endocrine disorders and birth malformations.
- 29.
Herculine Barbin is another notorious case. Intersex, Barbin was raised as a woman but her biological sex was later revealed as male. After a physical examination determined her biological sex, she lost her civil status as a woman. Devastated, Barbin eventually committed suicide. See Barbin. For an excellent assessment of the medical treatment of intersex Victorians, see Dreger’s “Doubtful Sex” and Hermaphrodites.
- 30.
Since there is abundant historical evidence that d’Éon identified as female for the majority of her adult life, I am using a female pronoun when referring to her (and some scholars revise her title to the feminine “Chevalière”).
- 31.
See Dowling and Dowling. For more on the Chevalier d’Éon, see Kates, Gary. Monsieur d’Éon Is a Woman, d’Éon, and Burrows et. al.
- 32.
Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and other sexologists connected enlarged male breasts with sexual inversion as well as an effeminate voice. See Dreger for a helpful discussion of nineteenth-century theories of gynaecomastia, sexual variance, and the hermaphrodite.
- 33.
The Chevalier d’Éon’s life has received considerable attention in encyclopaedias, histories of France, and in biographies. d’Éon’s gender ambiguity has seen much recent attention. See Kates, “d’Éon Returns to France” and his Monsieur d’Éon is a Woman; also see Garber.
- 34.
By the nineteenth century, the idea of sexual inversion had emerged as a scientific explanation of homosexuality.
- 35.
Barbin’s memoir is evidence of her female gender identification so I am using female pronouns while acknowledging that others may use plural pronouns instead.
- 36.
Koch offers an excellent analysis of the memoir and medical reports.
- 37.
According to Professor Tardieu who interviewed her, Alexina possessed a two-inch clitoris that hardened and internally ejaculated semen. See his and the other autopsy reports in Barbin’s Memoirs.
- 38.
There are several insightful studies of Victorian hermaphrodites, including Cindy LaCom and Bashant.
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Zigarovich, J. (2022). Intersex Boundaries: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hermaphroditic Bodies. In: Cogan, L., O'Connell, M. (eds) Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13363-3_3
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