Translating Intersexuality: Producing Multiple Readings with One Body/TextEmily Rose, University of East AngliaEmily.Rose@uea.ac.uk

Herculine Barbin

Ambroise Tardieu 1874 Michel Foucault 1978 Richard MacDougall 1980

Intersex

‘“Intersex” is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male […] Intersex is a socially constructed category that reflects real biological variation’ (Intersex Society of North America, online).

Three phases of treatment

‘The first phase understood the intersexual as two sexes in one body. One of these sexes dominated and gender assignment was based on this natural domination. Phase two considered there to be one true sex, decipherable only by physicians. Gender assignment was based on the physician’s expert declaration of the individual’s true sex. In the most recent phase physicians and the psychiatric community conjoin expertise to uncover the best sex appropriate to morphology, psychology and, […] expediency’ (Hird and Germon 2001: 163-164).

The Aristotelian position allowed for genital doubling but this made no difference at all to the body’s single sex ‘for this was determined according to Aristotle, by the heat of the heart and, regardless of corporeal morphology, was always decisively determined as male or female’ (Tidd 2000: 76).

This meant that binary notions of sex were unharmed by intersexuality. The intersex person became, ‘as increasingly more systematic and rigid categorizations of sexual differences took hold throughout the eighteenth century, an anomaly: a social, medical or sportive curiosity’ (Gilbert 2002: 159-160).

By the late 19th century ‘it was not only the hermaphrodite’s body that lay ensconced in ambiguity, but medical and scientific concepts of male and female as well’ (Dreger 1998: 16).

Intersex people are prevented from ‘challeng[ing] and destabiliz[ing] the conventional boundary between female and male, and between homosexual and heterosexual’ (Graham 2009: 13).Queer theory can undo the imposition of the heterosexual matrix on ambiguous bodies because queer ‘is a slippery category that refuses to be called into service of the heterosexual/homosexual framework and that defies any neat categorization of gender or of sexuality, even resisting the notion of a biologically objective sex’ (Holmes 2008: 19).

Ze: he or sheHir: him or herHirself: himself or herself

Morgan Holmes: ‘my use of “hir” in such cases is not intended to decide for hir that s/he is transgendered or transsexed, but to allow the recognition of multiple sex and gender identifications (2008: 169).

Herculine: profile

• Born: February 8th 1838• Christened: Herculine

Adélaïde Barbin• AKA: Alexina• Pseudonym: Camille• Doctor’s report: ‘Alexina is a

man, hermaphrodite without doubt, but with an evident predominance of the masculine sex’ (Chesnet in Barbin 2014: 150, my translation).• ‘Male’ name: Abel• Died: Age 30, Paris, 1868

Isabelle Gruault as Barbin in

Mystère Alexina

In a footnote on the first page Tardieu writes: ‘I reproduce here the text almost in its entirety as it was transmitted to me. I remove only the passages which prolong the story without adding any interest’ (1874: 63, my translation)

Foucault’s introductionIn his introduction, Foucault believes that Barbin lives in a ‘happy limbo of non-identity’ (1980: xiii). This is despite the fact that ‘the “official” Foucault argues that sexuality is always situated within matrices of power, that it is always produced or constructed within specific historical practices, both discursive and institutional’ (Butler 2006: 131-132).Judith Butler makes it very clear that Foucault’s introduction is a misreading because: ‘Whether “before” the law as a multiplicitous sexuality or “outside” the law as an unnatural transgression, those positionings are invariably “inside” a discourse which produces sexuality and then conceals that production through a configuring of a courageous and rebellious sexuality “outside” of the text itself’ (2006: 134).

The individual can ‘subvert its strategic orientations and benefit from the unanticipated consequences yielded by such subversions’ (Lafrance 2002: 122)

What Barbin does is ‘use linguistic gender in ways both paradoxical and ironic; [… ze] call[s] the very system whose simple binary excludes [hir] into play to generate [hir] own meanings’ (Livia 2002: 192).

The question here is: could a translation also subvert the strategic orientations of power and therefore benefit from unanticipated consequences?

‘In the English translation of the text, it is difficult to render the play of the masculine and feminine adjectives which Alexina applies to herself […] The editors of the English-language edition have followed Herculine’s system wherever possible, italicizing the feminine nouns which she used in referring to herself’ (1980: xiii-xiv).

Richard MacDougall chooses not to show Barbin’s switches between masculine and feminine gender but only mentions them in a footnote:

‘J’ai vingt-cinq ans et quoique jeune encore, j’approche, à n’en pas douter, du terme fatal de mon existence. J’ai beaucoup souffert, et j’ai souffert seul ! seul ! abandonné de tous ! […] Soucieux et rêveur, mon front semblait s’affraisser sous les poids de sombres mélancolies. J’étais froide, timide, et en quelque sorte, insensible à toutes ces joies bruyantes et ingénues qui font épanouir un visage d’enfant’ (Barbin 2014: 25). ‘I am twenty-five years old, and, although I am still young, I am beyond any doubt approaching the hour of my death. I have suffered much, and I have suffered alone! Alone! Forsaken by everyone […] Anxious and brooding, my brow seemed to sink beneath the weight of dark melancholic thoughts. I was cold, timid, and, in a way, indifferent to all those boisterous and ingenuous joys that light up the faces of children’ (MacDougall 1980: 3)

Barbin the writer inserts hirself into Camille the narrator’s story: ‘Her/his literary anxiety acts as a metaphor for her/his anxiety over sexual identity and potency, as literary form mimes the autobiographical subject’s ambiguous corporeal morphology, thereby observing the common autobiographical trope of conflating textual body with authorial self’ (Tidd 2000: 77).According to Anna Livia, ‘[t]he solipsistic masculine qualifiers soucieux and rêveur apply equally to the Camille of the time of writing and the Camille of long ago, while the socially oriented feminine froide and timide apply only to the earlier Camille’ (2001: 179).

Before possession After possessionPage 40: ‘heureux’ [happy] (masculine)

Page 76: ‘fou’ [mad] (masculine)

Page 44: ‘heureux’ [happy] (masculine)

Page 77: ‘assis’ [seated] (masculine)

Page 49 : ‘honteux’ [ashamed] (masculine)

Page 78: ‘arrivé’ [arrived] (masculine)

Page 71: ‘jalouse’ [jealous] (feminine)

Page 79: ‘inculpée’ [accused] (feminine)

Page 73: ‘émue’ [moved] (feminine)

Page 80: ‘invitée’ [invited] (feminine)

Page 74: ‘folle’ [mad] (feminine)

Page 81: ‘seule’ [alone] (feminine)

Barbin uses ‘[g]rammaticalized gender, which many feel as a trap to limit people in their gender roles, [to] provide linguistic devices for expressing gender fluidity’ (Livia 2002: 192).

But what can we do in an English translation?

We need a device that signifies the queerness of all identity and text by juxtaposing the natural body with the unnatural body and the source with the target to show they are not mutually exclusive: ‘as a text is being read in a language, medium of juxtaposition other than that of its origin, together they expose and give scope to previously unseen significances and allow new intertextualities to develop’ (Henitiuk 2012: 4).

Is there a type of text, more modern than the palimpsest, which can attempt to demonstrate how texts are never complete, always plural and made up of networks of meaning? Because the meaning of a word is always deferred as Derrida suggests, ‘the original, pure source is nowhere to be found. […] Thanks to them complex interplay between metaphors, contextual cues and texts of many layers, any meanings and associations’ (Kitzman 2006: 77).

According to George P. Landow, ‘hypertext [is] an information technology consisting of individual blocks of text , or lexias, and the electronic links that join them’ (1994: 1).

With the technological hypertext, ‘[t]he critic has to give up not only the idea of mastery but also that of a single text at all as the mastery and mastered object disappear […] the critic […] becomes more like the scientist, who admits that his or her conclusions take the form, inevitably, of mere samples’ (Landow 1994: 35).

The critic (and the translator-as-critic) must see the text as an entangled experiment, the spaces between the object and the experiment quiver with uncertainty and therefore multiple experiments must be produced, never solving the problem but always asking new questions. Hypertext signifies the messiness of writing as queer ‘signifies the messiness of identity’ (Giffney 2009: 2).

Queering a text ‘is an attempt to resist being made a slave to the discourses one is operating within at any one moment by peeling back the multitudinous layers of meaning contained within each and every pronouncement’ (Giffney 2009: 1)

The layers of hypertext are important, but so are the spaces between them, as the translator is drawn to the quiet spaces of texts so to for the queer theorist ‘[w]hat is not said – slips, silences and unfinished thoughts – garner as much interest as that which is verbalised; unpicking the latent content becomes as important a task as understanding that which is stated directly’ (Giffney 2009: 7).

Hypertext moves between different mediums and produces ‘refraction [which] involves the turning or bending of something as it passes from one medium into another, the term normally being used of light or sound waves, which become oblique as they encounter the boundary between media of different densities’ (Henitiuk 2012: 3).

www.translatingherculine.wordpress.com

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k76971v/f69.tableDesMatieres

http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph4.htm#478205197

I was singularly bowleÎ-over

It would appear that one text or one body goes into the prism but multiple texts and multiple bodies come out.

Translation is a means to demonstrating that no text and no body is ever ‘one’ - not even the ‘normative’ body or the ‘original’ text.