Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

physiological processes as well as in the proliferation of pleasures outside of the framework of intelligibility enforced by univocal sexes within a binary relation. The sexual world in which Herculine resides,
according to Foucault, is one in which bodily pleasures do not immediately signify sex as their primary cause and ultimate meaning it is a world, he claims, in which grins hung about without the cat (xiii).
Indeed, these are pleasures that clearly transcend the regulation imposed upon them, and here we see Foucault’s sentimental indulgence in the very emancipatory discourse his analysis in The History of
Sexuality was meant to displace. According to this Foucaultian model of emancipatory sexual politics, the overthrow of sex results in the release of a primary sexual multiplicity, a notion not so far afield from the psychoanalytic postulation of primary polymorphousness or
Marcuse’s notion of an original and creative bisexual Eros subsequently repressed by an instrumentalist culture.
The significant difference between Foucault’s position in the first volume of The History of Sexuality and in his introduction to Herculine
Barbin is already to be found as an unresolved tension within the History
of Sexuality itself (he refers thereto bucolic and innocent pleasures of intergenerational sexual exchange that exist prior to the imposition of various regulative strategies [31]). On the one hand, Foucault wants to argue that there is no sex in itself which is not produced by complex interactions of discourse and power, and yet there does seem to be a multiplicity of pleasures in itself which is not the effect of any specific discourse/power exchange. In other words, Foucault invokes a trope of prediscursive libidinal multiplicity that effectively presupposes asexuality before the law indeed, asexuality waiting for emancipation from the shackles of sex On the other hand, Foucault officially insists that sexuality and power are coextensive and that we must not think that by saying yes to sex we say no to power. In his anti- juridical and anti-emancipatory mode, the official Foucault argues that sexuality is always situated within matrices of power, that it is
Subversive Bodily Acts
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always produced or constructed within specific historical practices,
both discursive and institutional, and that recourse to asexuality before the law is an illusory and complicitous conceit of emancipatory sexual politics.
The journals of Herculine provide the opportunity to read
Foucault against himself, or, perhaps more appropriately, to expose the constitutive contradiction of this kind of anti-emancipatory call for sexual freedom. Herculine, called Alexina throughout the text, narrates a story about her tragic plight as one who lives a life of unjust victimization, deceit, longing, and inevitable dissatisfaction. From the times he was a young girls he reports, she was different from the other girls. This difference is a cause for alternating states of anxiety and self-importance through the story, but it is there as tacit knowledge before the law becomes an explicit actor in the story. Although
Herculine does not report directly on her anatomy in the journals,
the medical reports that Foucault publishes along with Herculine’s own text suggest that Herculine might reasonably be said to have what is described as either a small penis or an enlarged clitoris, that where one might expect to find a vagina one finds a “cul-de-sac,” as the doctors put it, and, further, that she doesn’t appear to have identifiably female breasts. There seems also to be some capacity for ejaculation that is not fully accounted for within the medical documents.
Herculine never refers to anatomy as such, but relates her predicament in terms of a natural mistake, a metaphysical homelessness, a state of insatiable desire, and a radical solitariness that, before her suicide, is transformed into a full-blown rage, first directed toward men, but finally toward the world as such.
Herculine relates in elliptical terms her relations with the girls at school, the mothers at the convent, and finally her most passionate attachment with Sara who becomes her lover. Plagued first with guilt and then with some unspecified genital ailment, Herculine exposes her secret to a doctor and then a priest, a set of confessional acts that effectively force her separation from Sara. Authorities confer and

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