Herculine Barbin (Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite) (Paperback)

by Michel Foucault (Author), Richard McDougall (Translator) "I am twenty five-five years old, and, although I am still young, I am beyond any doubt approaching the hour of my death..." (more)
Key Phrases: external genital organs, true sex, excellent woman, Mother Superior, Head Sister, Saint Jean (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate lover of another schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man. Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of thirty in a miserable attic in Paris.

Here, in an erotic diary, is one lost voice from our sexual past. Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to our own notions of sexuality. Michel Foucault, who discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the graphic medical descriptions of Herculine's body before and after her death. In a striking contrast, a painfully confused young person and the doctors who examine her try to sort out the nature of masculine and feminine at the dawn of the age of modern sexuality.

"Herculine Barbin can be savored like a libertine novel. The ingenousness of Herculine, the passionate yet equivocal tenderness which thrusts her into the arms, even into the beds, of her companions, gives these pages a charm strangely erotic...Michel Foucault has a genius for bringing to light texts and reviving destinies outside the ordinary."Le Monde, July 1978

Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (June 12, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394738624
• ISBN-13: 978-0394738628
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #267,395 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very deep and intriguing novel!, January 26, 1999

By A Customer

I had the pleasure of reading this novel for a college class, and I must admit that it was psychologically stimulating in one sense, and poignant in another sense. The fact that the story is actually based on true events makes the novel all the more appealing.

1 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully Catholic, March 3, 2003

By	Michael Angelo Faulkner (Ocean Grove, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir of a fascinating but so troubled human being. As a Catholic myself, I am especially impressed by how wonderful the people who surrounded Herculine were. Here these simple people were faced with a most complex and mystifying problem and they treated Herculine with so much kindness. As all were Catholics, I enjoy this memoir as a fine Catholic book.