Abstract
Herculine Barbin was a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite. She was born in 1838 and was assigned the sex of female. Her family called her Alexina, but she was legally forced to change her sex to male in 1860. In 1868, he committed suicide and left his memoirs. Michel Foucault discovered the memoirs and wrote an introduction to the English-language translation of the memoirs. Judith Butler contends that Foucault’s short but significant introduction to the memoirs is in some ways contradicted by his theory of sexuality offered in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. According to Butler, Foucault fails to recognize the concrete relations of power that both construct and condemn Herculine’s sexuality, romanticizing her world of pleasures as the “happy limbo of a non-identity,” a world of that exceeds the categories of sex and of identity. However, this paper tries to show that Foucault’s interpretation of Alexina story does not fail in following his theory of sexuality. When his question “Do we need truly a true sex?” is considered in relation with Oscar Panizza’s “A Scandal at the Convent,” her world of pleasures with a non-identity has its meaning.
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