Genital Inspections in 1952: Staging the Appearance of Transsexuality in France

Abstract

Jean de Létraz’s unpublished, little-known vaudeville play The Maiden of Auteuil (La pucelle d’Auteuil) ends, after the stage goes black and just before the curtain falls, with six characters performing a genital inspection on the main character Camille, who passed as both a man and a woman over the course of the play. Performed at the Palais-Royal Theatre in Paris in 1952, the comic play highlights anxieties in the 50 s about how cisgender communities know who is and is not “transsexual.” This article interprets this striking final scene in light of the rest of the play and the legal, medical, and cultural context of 1950s France, arguing that the genital inspection performs the reestablishment of public order out of gender disorder at the same time as it warns the French public about the coming hegemony of binarized sexual definition based on external appearance of genitalia, as codified in French juridical discourse.