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Herculine Barbin
Herculine Barbin | Michel Foucault
3 posts | 8 read | 1 reading | 1 to read
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.
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Dilara
Herculine Barbin | Michel Foucault
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A couple of weeks ago, on the anniversary of Foucault's death, the garden of his family home was open to the public, as was his office, & 2 short plays, including the premiere of the 1 based on the tagged book, were given for free. I was there, but as photos were not allowed, there's no proof 😊. I enjoyed the play, and am now reading the book. It contains Herculine's own account of her life as an intersex person in the 19th century.

Dilara ⬇She was brought up as a girl, was outed & forced to live as a man after puberty, and committed suicide very young. Also contains an introduction by Foucault, various medical and legal documents related to the case, a scabrous short story by Oscar Panizza inspired by their life, and a postface by Eric Fassin, an academic specialising in gender & sexual orientation. 3mo
sarahbarnes Wow, very cool. 3mo
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Faranae
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Happy New Year! Welcome to the #FRC2023 The 25 prompts just manage to squeeze onto a bingo card. You can tag me to submit entries, and if you put your book in the same spot on the bingo card, I'll know that's an entry, or you can make individual posts and mention the prompt! All the shareables, printables, and ways to enter are on the blog.

The tagged book is a just one option of many for “A book by a trans and/or intersex author“.

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xicanti
Herculine Barbin | Herculine Barbin
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I took a long, excellent bike ride this morning, with a couple stop offs at IKEA so I could buy a new library bag and get a free coffee. The coffee went down easy alongside HERCULINE BARBIN, the memoir of an intersex person who lived in the mid-1800s. So far, it‘s interesting but not propulsive.