FREN 421: Non-binary bodies and identity in 19th century France: Background/Context

This book traces the long and complex history of the androgyne throughout Western aesthetics, philosophy, mythology and literature, from Plato to contemporary feminist theory, with particular attention given to the Romantic period [...] Kari Weil shows that, rather than being a synthesis of male and female, the androgyne has been a construction of patriarchal ideology that has served to establish sexual, aesthetic and racial hierarchies.

This collection of fifteen essays deals with the representations, theories, and problematics of homosexuality in French writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though focusing on literature, it also includes other self-conscious writing, such as medical discourse and lexicography. Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the essays reflect the renewed approach of gender and sexuality […] The essays are the product of a new stage in the development of gender studies: a look at all the genders, a recognition of a completely destabilized system of genders and sexes, a privileging of the slippages, ambiguities, and tropings among these positions. The essays range from studies of traditional narrative and poetry to readings of medical records, from examinations of twentieth-century narratives of gay liberation to readings of gender in the post-colonial world.

Moscovici proposes a new understanding of how gender relations were reformulated by both male and female writers in nineteenth-century France. She analyzes the different versions of gendered citizenship elaborated by Friedrich Hegel, George Sand, Honore de Balzac, Auguste Comte and Herculine Barbin revealing a shift from a single dialectical (or male-centered) definition of citizenship to a double dialectical (or bi-gendered) one in which each sex plays an important role in subject-citizenship and is defined as the negation of the other sex. Moscovici further argues that a double dialectical pattern of androgyny endows women with a (relational) cultural identity that secures their paradoxical roles as both representatives and outsiders to subject-citizenship in nineteenth-century French society and culture.

Between Genders studies representations of gender in a group of early and mid-nineteenth-century French texts. The five texts examined are diverse in both literary form and theme: two novels, Honore de Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, Theophile Gantier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, a novella by Charles Baudelarie, La Fanfarlo, Claire de Duras's pseudo-confession narrative, Ourika, and an autobiography of an intersexual, currently known under the title Herculine Barbin […] Between Genders demonstrates how gender differentiation becomes a defining issue in early French Modernism. It also explores how border crossings among seemingly distinct terms of identification (heterosexuality, homosexualities, androgyny, etc.) put in question the idea of identity and provoke reconsideration of other important issues: esthetic, ethical, and political questions that are the subject of intense scrutiny and contestation throughout the period.

[…] Rhonda Garelick locates a prototype of the star personality in the dandies and aesthete literary figures of the nineteenth century, including Beau Brummell, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Oscar Wilde, and explores their peculiarly charged relationship with women and performance. When fin-de-siècle aesthetes turned their attention to the new, "feminized" spectacle of mass culture, Garelick argues, they found a disturbing female counterpart to their own highly staged personae. […] Garelick's analysis of this encounter covers a wide range of topics, from the gender complexity of the European male dandy and the mechanization of the female body to Orientalist performance, the origins of cinema, and the emergence of "crowd" theory and mass politics.