The Discourse of the Scalpel and the Limbo of Non-identity: Doing Justice to Herculine Barbin

In this essay I will make a comparative analysis of Butlers reading of Herculin Barbin in Gender Trouble and David Reimer in Undoing Gender. My reading of Undoing Gender will illustrate reflective moments in which Butler herself describes spaces outside of intelligibility. First, my analysis will consist of in reading Butlers earlier work against her more recent writings on gender. Utilizing the same critical lens that Butler incorporated to compare Foucault’s later work against his earlier writing will bring to the fore important tensions in Bulter’s gender theory and her relationship with Foucault. Second, I will describe the discourse of the scalpel that is found in the narratives of both Barbin and David. I find that Barbin’s framework foreshadows the discourse of the scalpel that Judith Bulter identifies within the life story of David Reimer. Then I will give an account of the discourse of the scalpel as a form of biopower. I will supplement my analysis of Bulter with Jemima Repo’s essay, Herculine Barbin and the Omission of Biopolitics from Judith Butler’s Gender Genealogy. Taken together my analysis will elucidate a lineage between Herculine Barbin and David Reimer that calls for a reexamination of Butler’s relationship with Foucault. The conditions of intelligibility from which we emerge and are recognized as human, are composed of a set of complex and culturally situated norms. These norms are preconditions of what it means to be socially and legally recognized as human. To fall outside of societal norms is impermissible, dangerous and even criminal. Those who fall outside of sexual norms and categories of gender are particularly susceptible to numerous forms of violence. This violence is manifest in the discrimination that sexual and gender minorities face at the hands of their peers, the law, the psychiatrist’s couch, and the surgeon’s scalpel. Two exemplary cases of individuals who gave personal accounts of the violence of over-determination are Herculine Barbin and David Reimer. While these two cases are not the same (Herculine was an intersex person who lived in 19 century France and David was a biological male born in the late 20 century who after a botched circumcision was raised as girl.) They serve as important points of Res Cogitans (2014) 5 Laybourn-Candlish | 129 2155-4838 | commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans reference and departure for understanding the processes of over-determination to which bodies are susceptible. In this essay I will make a comparative analysis of Butler’s reading of Herculine Barbin in Gender Trouble and David Reimer in Undoing Gender. I will concentrate on passages in Gender Trouble in which Butler critiques Foucault’s reading of Herculine Barbin’s memoir, particularly his description of the “happy limbo of non-identity” My reading of Undoing Gender will illustrate reflective moments in which Butler herself describes spaces outside of intelligibility. First, I will give a description of bio-power. Second, I will describe the “discourse of the scalpel” that is found in the narratives of both Barbin and David. I find that Barbin’s framework foreshadows the discourse of the scalpel that Judith Butler identifies within the life story of David Reimer because of the advent of bio-power. Finally, my analysis will consist of reading Butler’s earlier work against her more recent writings on gender concentrating on her work on David Reimer. Utilizing the same critical lens that Butler employed in her writing comparing Foucault’s later work against his earlier writing will bring to the fore important tensions in Butler’s own gender theory and her relationship to Foucault. My analysis will elucidate a lineage between Herculine Barbin and David Reimer that calls for a reexamination of Butler’s relationship with Foucault, which will open new potential for notions of intelligibility. Bio-power surfaced as a dominant paradigm in the nineteenth century. Bio-power designates what “brought to life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge power an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault 143). In the eighteenth century, bodies freely made a display of themselves, enjoying a sexual candor that ended when the Victorians began to constrict and regulate sex. Our will to know, to uncover and demystify sex, has led us to construct and accept a science of sexuality. This will to know is inherent to bio-power. According to Foucault, “The agencies of power are determined to speak about it, to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (Foucault 18). In other words mechanisms in the areas of religion, psychoanalysis economics, pedagogy, medicine and law “incite, extract, distribute, and internalize sexual verbosity” (Kurzweil 219). It was through this incitement to discourse that the sciences of sex took charge of sex. At the same time sex was made inappropriate to speak of, and confined to the bedroom or the confessional, experts began to freely and openly discuss it. The presence of sex in discourse became ever more prevalent as the power over it increased, leading new sites of sexual pleasure to emerge from the very regimes that sought to control it (Kurzweil 219). The more people constructed means to restrict sex, the more sex became the topic of discussion and subject of inquiry. The secrets of sex were laid bare as they became medically and legally exposed. Perversion became codified; observations in hospitals, prisons, schools and homes regulated the boundaries of Res Cogitans (2014) 5 Laybourn-Candlish | 13