The Bastard Offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite : Sexual ‘Anomalies’ and Medical Curiosity in France

Gabrielle Houbre (1)

1 CERILAC (EA_4410) - Centre D'Etude et de Recherche Interdisciplinaire de l'UFR LAC

Biological and cultural, the body, by reason of the diver­sity of its conditions, has always garnered attention, raised questions, and served as fuel for the imagination. 1 As the primary expression of an individual's physical and moral integrity, it bears witness to the process of civilization as it does to mechanisms of social control. Emit­ting its own eloquent and meaningful language, it embodies the imme­diate referent to identity and, in a breathtaking mise en abîme for a medical body disrupted by the hermaphrodite body, to otherness. Be­fore being an impossible sex for a society, which rests upon a sexual dichotomy, the hermaphrodite is a dissident body, marked by the en­tanglement of masculine and feminine. It is down to doctors to disen­tangle if not separate the two skeins and to determine which will prevail at the expense of the other.

Mots clés: Medicine; intersex; hermaphrodites; France 19th

Domaines: Histoire; Etudes sur le genre; Biologie de la reproduction

Gabrielle Houbre. The Bastard Offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite : Sexual ‘Anomalies’ and Medical Curiosity in France. Peter Cryle, Christopher E. Forth. Sexuality at the Fin-de-Siecle. The Making of a “Central Problem”, University of Delaware Press, pp.61-73, 2008, 978-1611491012. ⟨hal-01353780⟩