Herculine Barbin

By Michel Foucault

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9780307833099

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault. Nacido en 1926 en Poitiers, Francia, es uno de los pensadores más influyentes del siglo XX. Alumno de la École Normale Supérieure de París, cursó estudios de Filosofía y Psicología. Durante la década de 1960, encabezó el Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad de Vincennes. En 1970 fue elegido en el Collège de France, una de las instituciones académicas más prestigiosas de su país, como profesor de Historia de los Sistemas de Pensamiento, cátedra que dictó hasta su muerte, en junio de 1984. En los años setenta y ochenta, su valiosa obra, publicada en gran parte por Siglo XXI Editores, lo convirtió en un intelectual de referencia y lo llevó a dictar numerosas conferencias y cursos en todo el mundo. Comprometido activamente en las luchas políticas y sociales, Foucault llevó a cabo un análisis minucioso de los mecanismos de control y de gobierno de la sociedad. Su pensamiento continúa siendo fuente de inspiración para estudiosos de distintas áreas y para quienes buscan mejorar la situación de los excluidos (los presos, los locos, las minorías sexuales, los inmigrantes, los jóvenes).

Reviews for Herculine Barbin

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book called an "erotic diary" was actually assigned reading in a political science course. This is the memoir of Herculine Barbin, a hermaphrodite who lived from 1838 to 1868, designated female at birth and then forced to take on a male identity when an affair with a women resulted in her physical examination and reassignment of gender as male by the courts. And no, it's not by Michel Foucault (thankfully--it's much more readable than anything by him I was forced to read in college.) Rather it could be said it was assembled by him, consisting of the memoir he discovered at the French Department of Public Hygiene to which he added the medical documentation of her condition--and in some editions--an introduction. I don't really recall it as all that erotic, but I did think it brought up some fascinating issues about gender identity.

[m2gilbert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this five years ago but picked it up last month. In addition to being a tragic story about a hermaphrodite (designated female at birth but later reclassified as a man), it explores the power matrices (medical/scientific, legal) involved in the construction of gender identity. It sells itself as an erotic diary, but I don't believe in the accuracy of the information used, archival excavation from the French Department of Public Hygiene par Monsieur Foucault notwithstanding. Read it to be moved by a life doomed to sorrow and to be angered by "the powers that be", if nothing else.