The Interplay of Literature and Medical Authority

Tuesday, October 20, 2026 - 10:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project In parallel with the 19th century French medical establishment's difficulties in responding to non-binary bodies, French literature enjoyed playing with ambiguous gender, and reflected many aspects of the medical trends. Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #582d Linton 2022 Unmaking Sex Chapter 3 About LHMP Full citation: Linton, Anne E. 2022. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4 Part II: Contextualizing High and Low Literary Narratives; Chapter 3 Is She or Isn’t He? Plotting Ambiguous Gender The second half of this book looks at the use of hermaphroditism (in its various interpretations) in 19th century French fiction, and how that interacted with real-life dynamics. The subjects of those novels were not necessarily depicted as intersex, but might challenge the integrated sex/gender/sexuality binary in other ways. Given the…