Nineteenth-Century Intersex Bodies and the ‘Appearance of a Double Sex’: Nadar’s Medical Anti-Illustration

Abstract

Abstract This essay demonstrates that Nadar’s 1860 ‘Hermaphrodite’ series disappeared from the famed French photographer’s oeuvre because it does not function as a medical illustration. It explains the relative obscurity of the series and reveals often-overlooked biases and distortions in medical illustrations. By placing the photographs in the context of nineteenth-century European medical theories about the intersex body, and the successful illustrations, often wood engravings, that accompanied those theories in texts, it reveals that Nadar’s series contradicted rather than supported existing anatomical teachings in an artistic medium renowned for its fidelity to nature, thus posing a threat to medical authority. Whereas doctors asserted that the hermaphrodite was a biological myth, an aberration obscuring natural male or female bodies that could be easily identified by experts, Nadar’s photographs, backed by the medium’s inherent claim to indexical truth, showed the intersex body as naturally integrated and complete and thus doomed themselves to obscurity.