Herculine Barbin
Herculine Barbin (1838–1868) was a French intersex person who was treated as a female at birth but was later redesignated a male after an affair and physical examination.
Biography
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. He was regarded as a girl and raised as such but later renamed himself Alexina. His family was poor but he gained a charity scholarship to study in the school of an Ursuline convent.
According to her account, he had a crush on an aristocratic female friend in school. He regarded himself as unattractive but sometimes slipped into his friend's room at night and was sometimes punished for that. However, his studies were successful and in 1856, at the age of seventeen he was sent to Le Chateau to study to become a teacher. There he fell in love with one of the teachers.
Although Barbin had hit puberty, she had not begun to menstruate and remained flat chested. She shaved her upper lip, cheeks and arms.
In 1857 Barbin became an assistant teacher at a girl's school. He fell in love with another teacher, Sara, and Barbin demanded that only she should dress him. Her ministrations turned into caresses and they became lovers. Eventually rumors about their affair begun to circulate.
Barbin began to suffer unexpected pains. When a doctor examined him, he was shocked and advised that he be sent away, but he stayed.
Eventually devoutly Catholic Barbin confessed to Jean-François-Anne Landriot, the Bishop of La Rochelle. He 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, he was physically male and had a very small penis with the testicles inside his body. In modern terms, he was a "male pseudohermaphrodite".
Later a legal decision determined that Barbin was officially male. He left his lover and his job, changed his name to Abel Barbin and was briefly mentioned in the press. He moved to Paris where he lived in poverty and wrote his memoirs, reputedly as a part of a therapy.
In February 1868, concierge of Barbin's house in rue de l'École-de-Médecine found him dead in his home. He had committed suicide by gas of 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 Auguste Ambroise Tardieu who later published excerpts of it. The excerpts were translated to English in 1980.
Michel Foucault discovered the memoirs in the French Department of Public Hygiene. He had the journals republished with his commentary. Judith Butler refers to the Foucault's work and the journals in Gender Trouble and Jeffrey Eugenides in his book Middlesex treats concurrent themes, as does Virginia Woolf in her book, Orlando: A Biography.
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.
Sources and further reading
- Barbin, Herculine (1980). Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite. introd. Michel Foucault, trans. Richard McDougall. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-50821-1.
- Dreger, Alice Domurat (1995). "Doubtful Sex: The Fate of the Hermaphrodite in Victorian Medicine". Victorian Studies. 38 (3): 335–370. ISSN 0042-5222.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - Lafrance, Mélisse (2002). "Uncertain Erotic: A Foucauldian Reading of Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B". SITES: the Journal of Contemporary French Studies. 6 (1): 119–131. doi:10.1080/10260210290021815. ISSN 1026-0218.
- Leroi, Armand Marie (2003). Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. New York: Viking. pp. 217–222. ISBN 0-670-03110-0.