In republishing Herculine Barbin Foucault sheds new light on the memoirs of what is now called the first intersex narrative, Alexina, as Foucault calls her in his introduction, tells the story of her life including the medical discovery in her adulthood that leads to her legal gender change. In his description of Herculine Barbin , Foucault suggests that Alexina’s happiness lies the “limbo of a non-identity” . I will continue to use the name Alexina and she/her terms throughout the essay, for ease, however these terms are insufficient as the translation of the German makes it difficult to “render the play of the masculine and feminine adjectives” . Foucault alludes to a time in Alexina’s life that is in direct opposition to when she has been …show more content…
Alexina’s happiness, as she expresses it looking back on her past, seems to be her time with Sara. Here, “happiness took the place of sleep for us” but equally it is her greatest torment. However, it is clear that her love for Sara does not cause her distress, nor does her body in the relationship, she takes pleasure in causing Sara pleasure. Her torment instead comes from her distress that her love for Sara cannot end the way that the discourse of love relationships at that time would accept. While one narrative would be to interpret Alexina’s statement “I sometimes envy the lot of the man who will be your husband.”” as her longing to be a man, instead it is clear from the context of her relationship that she simply longs their relationship could have the same respect, openness and eventual ending as what we would now call heterosexual relationship but then would be all relationships. As a consequence Alexina’s longing is not for a male identity but for something that the discourse of the society she is living in does not have the coding to describe. Despite this, Foucault’s argument that her happiness is in non-identity does not hold, as Drenth and Mak suggests “Foucault is guilty of […] presupposing a relation between biology and psychology, which …show more content…
In particular, she is distressed by her separation from Sara and “[t]o live alone, always alone” , without the knowledge of the codes of manhood that all the men around her know from lifetimes of experience. In fact, Alexina seems to be most distressed by the impossibility to fully embody this full identity, she describes herself as a “disinherited creature, a being without a name!” . Here Alexina’s description of her fate seems in direct opposition to Foucault’s argument regarding non-identity, her lack of full identity at this point, or lack of full classification into ‘normal’ roles, seems to be the cause of her distress not her happiness. In fact, in the final parts of her memoirs she expresses a hope that doctors and scientists will “analyse” her parts and “draw new information from it” . While it could be argued that Alexina’s hope here is not to be identified or classified, since she simply longs for information, the fact that she is so clearly distressed by being ‘nameless’ suggests that she finds no consolation in being ‘partly’ something. It could be argued then that the limbo state that Foucault describes is that state that Alexina embodies in her final moments, she is no longer a woman legally or medically and yet she is not fully a man either, she
In “Fault Lines” (1993), Meena Alexander’s autobiography utilizes multiple examples of rhetorical devices to describe her sense of identity, or more importantly, the shattered pieces of herself. She describes this process by comparing and contrasting the aspects of who she is as a person as opposed to what she once dreamed to be. She wrote her story to explain how hard her journey was in order to express how much it took out of her as a person “What might it mean to look at myself straight, see myself?”. (3) Her ambivalent tone can be targeted towards those who are still trying to figure out their sense of identities themselves, and how much it takes for a person to question themselves to find out who they are.
1 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) 217.
...oroform, a sensation-deadening stupor, the ecstasy of pain, and an awakening—mark Edna’s self-discovery throughout The Awakening. Still, in the end, Edna follows through with what she told Madame Ratignolle she would and would not be willing to do: “I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself” (69). She gives up her life because she is unwilling to give up her self—her desires, her cravings, and her passions to do what she wants selfishly and without regard for any other being’s wishes. She cannot escape motherhood, nor can she ever hope to find her idealized lover. Thus, she leaves these dissatisfactions behind her as she enjoys her final moments of empowerment and solitude wrapped in the folds of the sea, the hum of bees, and the smell of pinks’ musk.
Unsurprisingly, the novel is a classic coming of age story which centers on a young man who is confused about himself and his sexual identity in his early twenties. This confusion about himself and his sexual identity is the driving force of his interactions with his friends and lovers. Moreover, this confusion about himself and his sexual identity also facilitates the conflict and unforeseen consequences which occur during the novel.
Often times in literature the body becomes a symbolic part of the story. The body may come to define the character, emphasize a certain motif of the story, or symbolize the author’s or society’s mindset. The representation of the body becomes significant for the story. In the representation of their body in the works of Marie de France’s lais “Lanval” and “Yonec,” the body is represented in opposing views. In “Lanval,” France clearly emphasizes the pure beauty of the body and the power the ideal beauty holds, which Lanval’s Fairy Queen portrays. In France’s “Yonec,” she diverts the reader’s attention from the image of the ideal body and emphasizes a body without a specific form and fluidity between the forms. “Yonec” focuses on a love not based on the body. Although the representations of the body contradict one another, France uses both representation to emphasize the private and, in a way, unearthly nature of love that cannot be contained by the human world. In both lais, the love shared between the protagonists is something that is required to be kept in private and goes beyond a single world into another world.
Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the 18th and 20th Centuries. London: Harrester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
Her chief arguing points and evidence relate to the constriction of female sexuality in comparison to male sexuality; women’s economic and political roles; women’s access to power, agency, and land; the cultural roles of women in shaping their society; and, finally, contemporary ideology about women. For her, the change in privacy and public life in the Renaissance escalated the modern division of the sexes, thus firmly making the woman into a beautiful
Gender is a social construct created around the idea that the two sexes of male and female define whom we are, what we are like, and how we should live. In our modern world, many people have come to the realization that biological sex and gender identity are two separate categories and often have no impact on personality. For many thousands of years, in various cultures however, there have been defined jobs and lives for men and women. In The Sphere of Women, Goethe constructs definitions of male and female by creating separate lives for women and men and exalting in the personal traits naturally found in both genders.
In their publication, “Doing Gender, ” Candance West and Don H. Zimmerman put forward their theory of gender as an accomplishment; through, the daily social interactions of a man or woman which categorize them as either masculine or feminine. From a sociological perspective the hetero-normative categories of just sex as biological and gender as socially constructed, are blurred as a middle ground is embedded into these fundamental roots of nature or nurture.To further their ideology West and Zimmerman also draw upon an ethnomethodological case study of a transsexual person to show the embodiment of sex category and gender as learned behaviours which are socially constructed.Therefore, the focus of this essay will analyze three ideas: sex, sex
(6) Simone deBeauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by H.M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1972) p. xxx
The construction of gender is based on the division of humanity to man and woman. This is impossible ontologically speaking; because the humans are not divided, thus gender is merely an imaginary realm. It only exist in the language exercises, and the way that cultural products are conceived in them. This essay is a preliminary attempt to offer an analysis of ‘One Is Not Born a Woman’ by Wittig and ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone De Beauvoir holds on the language usage contribution to the creation of genders and the imagined femininity.
Throughout Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Notley uses the character’s bodies as a way to create an identity. The use of disempowerment creates a path to form unification between a man and a woman; push away gender division. By breaking the binary structure that is within society, Notley shines light on maintaining identity and bodies. In other words, Notley expresses that sex is distinct from gender; Alette acts as a link to represent that sex is a costume.
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
In Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power by Sandra Bartky, the writer examines the disciplinary practices which produces a body that gesture and appearance is feminine. Bartky challenges the social construction of femininity by revealing how feminine serves the interest of domination. She talks about apparatus of discipline, the disciplinarians that discipline. According to her, it is a system of micro power that is essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical. Taking into consideration one of the concepts of her analysis, feminine bodily discipline is something imposed on subjects and at the same time something that can be sought voluntarily. I will base my analysis on these dual characters and I will demonstrate that the production of femininity is more like something imposed
This essay will analyze and critique Michel Foucault’s (1984) essay The Use of Pleasure in order to reveal certain internal weaknesses it contains and propose modifications that would strengthen his reading of sexuality as a domain of moral self-formation. In order to do so, it will present a threefold critique of his work. Firstly, it will argue that that his focus on solely the metric of pleasure divorced from its political manifestations underemphasizes state power as a structuring principle of sexuality. Secondly, it will posit that his attention to classical morality privileges written works by male elites and fails to account for the subtexts that would demonstrate other forms of morality. Finally, it will argue that the nature of actors’ resistance to moral codes, explicated through Butler’s concept of iterability and signification, is an important factor that should also be considered. As a result of this critique, this essay