Orientation and Supplementation: Locating the “Hermaphrodite” in the Encyclopédie

Abstract

When Calliope Stephanides, adolescent intersex protagonist of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex (2002), visits New York Public Library in search of information about her physical condition, she is struck by sheer size of dictionary located at center of library's reading room:I had never seen such a big dictionary before. The Webster's at New York Public Library stood in same relation to other dictionaries of my acquaintance as Empire State Building did to other buildings. It was an ancient, medieval-looking thing, bound in brown leather that brought to mind a falconer's gauntlet. The pages were gilded like Bible's.1The dictionary's monumental size and its patina mark its authority. Its gilded pages eventually lead Calliope to entry for hermaphrodite, term used for intersex condition in medical writing until mid-twentieth century and still pervasive in popular discourse today.2 The Webster's entry allows Calliope to make sense of her doctor's medical jargon and his plan to perform surgery on her nonnormative genitals. Calliope's observation that [h]ere was a book that contained collected knowledge of past (431) highlights central role played by reference works in curation and dissemination of knowledge. Reference works fully assumed this privileged position during Enlightenment, with publication of Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers (175172). The Webster's towering presence in twenty-first-century America mirrors status of monumental collection of knowledge spearheaded by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert in mid-eighteenth century. Because French was lingua franca of intellectual sphere, Encyclopedie's impact was not limited to France but extended to all of Europe, including German-speaking lands, which provided readers as well as authors. Like Webster's, Encyclopedie and its sequel, Supplement a l'Encyclopedie (1776-77), both contain an entry on hermaphrodite. The complexity of three-page Encyclopedie article and existence of an even longer follow-up entry in Supplement exemplify both Enlightenment ideal to solve all mysteries and struggle with this same ideal. At same time that these reference works strive for objectivity and uniformity, they are shaped by various contributors' perceptions of world. Defining hermaphrodite is a hermeneutical endeavor that illustrates tensions underlying entire encyclopedic project.The complex task of definition results from fact that hermaphrodite possesses one of those that, as Sara Ahmed argues in Queer Phenomenology, do not easily or comfortably extend into space. The hermaphrodite's body is queer in sense that it hurts itself against that consolidate a heteronormative straight line. Ahmed's observation that become orientated by how they take up time and space applies to eighteenth-century encyclopedic geography.5 The definition of hermaphroditic body cannot be contained within rigid confines of encyclopedic entry; it constantly questions entry's boundaries and thereby performs a disorientating move. The hermaphrodite undermines goals of encyclopedic effort by destabilizing seemingly definitive definitions that are outdated as soon as they are ushered into print. The hermaphrodite's physical hybridity queers Enlightenment ideal of elucidating dark recesses of all natural phenomena, including human body. As Alice Dreger argues, the discovery of a hermaphroditic' body raises doubts not just about particular body in question, but about all bodies and, by extension, about body of knowledge produced in a particular time period.-* In her pioneering study, Dreger outlines cultural history of intersexuality, beginning in late nineteenth century, which she calls Age of Gonads. …