Herculine Barbin By Michel Foucault

Essentially, Butler raises the question of does the body truly need to be sexed? And if sexed does a person’s gender truly have to act in accordance to the conventional and hegemonic notions of gender that exist in these fixed states of corporeal permeability and impermeability. In this discourse the body acts as a pre-existing surface which cultural inscription defines a both a person and their gender exclusively. But the act and implication of such a definition, results in creation of a clear and fixed divide between the male and female sexes, and by participating in this rhetoric, ultimately the body becomes bounded and constituted by the cultural and political forces at play. This concept consequently imposing an imperative and comfortable …show more content…
In the case of Herculine Barbin, Michel Foucault explores that from a medical perspective, a doctor when facing such a case as hermaphroditism, is not concerned with the presence of the two juxtaposed genders, but rather seeks to ‘[decipher] the true sex that [is] hidden’ beneath the ambiguous appearance of both. Despite the ambiguity of Barbin’s biology, society deemed that she needed to be gendered and sexed as to coincide with these fixed and impermeable notions of gender, encouraging whichever sex appeared as the ‘warmest or most vigorous’. The compulsivity of this discourse rejects to acknowledge the existence and not just idea of a mixed sex body, a body that cannot be defined by the pre-existing notions gender, as it disrupts them. But in response to this enigma society chooses to enforce a single gender belonging to a singular body as ‘everybody is to have one, and only one sex’, in an attempt to maintain the fixed sentiments of …show more content…
Ultimately this essentialization of sex imposes a system of univocity, a system which fails to recognise and acknowledge a multiplicity. In Foucault’s argument it is in this tradition of fixed gender that ‘we confront a fatal ambivalence produced by the prohibitive law’. In this statement he suggests that due to the on going enforcement of such a tradition, it somewhat places society in a state of ignorance, by which we ‘happily [disperse]’ genders and labels in a compulsive manner as to maintain the the existing jurisdiction of gender. But in cases such as Barbin’s this jurisdiction leaves her in a ‘happy limbo of non-identity’. The jurisdiction not only imposes a compulsive scheme of gender but also sees the the suggestion of Barbin as participating in the practice of female homosexuality as an insistent state of non identity, rather than viewing it as a ‘variety of female identities at