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Chapter 3 - Is She or Isn’t He?

Plotting Ambiguous Gender

from Part II - Contextualizing High and Low Literary Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2022

Anne E. Linton
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
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Summary

Chapter 3 reveals how long-forgotten popular novels become important intertexts for canonical fiction on hermaphrodism. Whether the influence is intentional and acknowledged as Balzac admits of Latouche’s Fragoletta, or perhaps unintentional or repressed as may have been the case with Cuisin’s Clémentine, these popular novels become a “missing link” between medical discourse and fictional representations of androgyny. In both Fragoletta and Clémentine, for example, doctors and medical sex determinations play important roles in plot development, which allows us to reconsider the stakes of Mademoiselle de Maupin’s transing enterprise, described by Gautier as a “medical” project. By examining classic fiction by Balzac, Gautier, and Zola through the lens of forgotten popular novels, we can see how works that have been described by literary critics as rehearsing a timeless version of myth are also interrogating the very same social anxiety one finds in contemporary debates surrounding hermaphrodism in medicine and the law. Just like their medical counterparts, novelists experiment with hermaphrodism using their own literary techniques, harnessing the power of unknown sex as a means to keep the reader reading.

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Chapter
Information
Unmaking Sex
The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France
, pp. 91 - 134
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Is She or Isn’t He?
  • Anne E. Linton, San Francisco State University
  • Book: Unmaking Sex
  • Online publication: 03 March 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009053037.004
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  • Is She or Isn’t He?
  • Anne E. Linton, San Francisco State University
  • Book: Unmaking Sex
  • Online publication: 03 March 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009053037.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Is She or Isn’t He?
  • Anne E. Linton, San Francisco State University
  • Book: Unmaking Sex
  • Online publication: 03 March 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009053037.004
Available formats
×