Les hermaphrodites, by Michel Foucault

Reviewed by Míša Stekl

Michel Foucault, Les hermaphrodites (Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2025), 153pp.

I was a wide-eyed undergrad when I first encountered Les hermaphrodites, the unfinished manuscript of Michel Foucault’s that was published last year by Éditions Gallimard. I happened upon the manuscript in Box 82 of the Foucault archives at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris. The year was 2018, and I was in Paris to research a different subject—Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche—so I did not have enough time to fully delve into the document, which was handwritten (in Foucault’s at-times difficult handwriting) and lacked a title. Yet I immediately sensed the significance of this mysterious manuscript, which seemed to align with Foucault’s original plan for the History of Sexuality series; as outlined on the (French) back cover of volume I, La volonté de savoir, Foucault initially planned to devote volume V to Les pervers (Perverts)—and this manuscript recounts how the ‘hermaphrodite’ came to represent ‘the pervert “in the flesh”’ (112).^[1] As Arianna Sforzini highlights in her preface to Les hermaphrodites, this text might well be (some part of) that fifth volume in Foucault’s original plan for History of Sexuality, before he abandoned that plan to turn instead toward the Greco-Romans. Then again, Sfrozini also notes that in 1978, Foucault said he was planning to write an entire ‘volume of the History of Sexuality devoted to the hermaphrodites’ (39). Or this forgotten text might be something else altogether. Whatever its place in Foucault’s œuvre, Les hermaphrodites clearly declares that the historical construction of hermaphrodism occupies a central place in the history of sexuality, for it was through the medico-juridical search for the ‘true sex’ of ‘hermaphroditic’ bodies that sexuality became (constructed as) the hidden truth of the self.

I was thrilled to learn, then, that Éditions Gallimard had recently released this hitherto-unpublished Foucault manuscript, along with a helpful preface by Arianna Sforzini as well as a postface by Éric Fassin. (The handwritten document was transcribed by Sforzini and Henri-Paul Fruchaurd.) With the 2025 publication of Les hermaphrodites, Foucault’s readers not only recoup a lost chapter in his History of Sexuality, but learn how the fraught history of ‘hermaphrodite’—cum intersex—identity gave rise to modern relations of sexuality and (bio)power, writ large. In what follows, I offer a summary of this as-yet untranslated manuscript, before assessing its promises, its pitfalls and its relevance to Foucault studies, queer theory, as well as trans and intersex studies.

In his much-cited 1978 introduction to the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a mid-nineteenth century French ‘hermaphrodite’, Foucault poses the question: ‘Do we truly need a true sex?’.^[2] Such are the historical stakes of ‘hermaphrodism’, for Foucault. In that 1978 introduction, he briefly observes that, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, the ‘hermaphrodite’ was not seen as belonging to one ‘true’ sex; rather, ‘the designation “hermaphrodite” was given to those in whom the two sexes were juxtaposed, in proportions that might be variable’ (vii). For centuries, French law, medicine, and society treated the ‘hermaphrodite’ as a kind of ‘double being’, who admixed two different sexes—and thus two different natures—in varying proportions; here was a being who belonged to both sexes (57). The crucial import of this history, for Foucault, is to destabilize the ‘modern’ construction of the ‘hermaphrodite’, according to which even the most ‘hermaphroditic’ bodies still possess one, and only one, ‘true sex’, to be uncovered by psychiatric, medical, and juridical trials. Les hermaphrodites offers a far more detailed account of this history. Over the course of 118 handwritten pages (or 73 transcribed/typed pages), Foucault traces how the ancient notion of the ‘hermaphrodite’ as embodying ‘one and the other sex was subordinated’ to the modern conception of the ‘hermaphrodite’ as either ‘one or the other sex’ (82) or else as ‘neither one nor the other’ (115). As doctors and courts set out to pin down the one ‘true sex’ that would lie hidden under ‘hermaphroditic’ sexual features, they at once constructed a new ‘norm’ of ‘sexuality’—as the core truth of one’s sex and one’s subjectivity—as well as a new model of hermaphrodism, as an ‘abnormal’ deviation from the ‘normal’ course of sexual development. By asking ‘what, finally, is the sex of the [hermaphroditic] individual, the first and final sex, in relation to which the elements or semblances of the other sex would be so many deformities’, modernity (re)constituted ‘norms’ of sexuality in the same movement as it constructed the ‘hermaphrodite’ as the sexual ‘abnormal’ par excellence (82). Les hermaphrodites thus elaborates how the norms and ‘abnormals’ of modern sexuality were co-constituted, going well beyond Foucault’s allusions to ‘hermaphrodism’ in History of Sexuality: Volume One, the Abnormal lectures and his introduction to Herculine Barbin’s memoirs.

The text opens with a sketch of how hermaphrodism was treated in French medicine, law and culture, until roughly the 17^th century. Ever the master of the opening line, Foucault begins: ‘Hermaphrodites—“those said to combine the two sexes within themselves”—have long been subject to a disparate regime’ (46). He first examines the juridical ‘regime’. He finds that the law tended to oblige ‘hermaphrodites’ to identify with their ‘predominant’ sex, for the purposes of baptism, education, and marriage. What Foucault finds striking—strikingly different from modernity—is that certain ‘hermaphrodites’ were permitted to ‘choose’ their predominant sex at the time of marriage, that is to choose whether to marry (a man) ‘as a woman’ or to marry (a woman) ‘as a man’ (47). Foucault is quick to qualify this surprising ‘liberalism’ or ‘freedom’ of sexual choice: ‘hermaphrodites’ were only permitted to make this ‘choice’ once and were punished, sometimes by death, if they later changed course; and besides, the ‘choice’ was only offered in certain exceptional cases. Doctors and priests were always the first to determine whether a ‘hermaphroditic’ individual was ‘more of a girl’ or ‘more of a boy’ at birth, and ‘hermaphrodites’ were only permitted to choose for themselves if their predominant sex characteristics changed with puberty (46). Moreover, ‘hermaphrodites’ tended to remain disqualified from the full privileges afforded to their sex of ‘choice’, particularly if that sex was male. The law ‘hence permitted the choice of sex if necessary; but at the same time, it punished the fact that it had been necessary to make a choice’ (51). Nevertheless, this pre-modern ‘liberalism’ stands out as a radically different determination of sex: ‘We are far from the contemporaneous regime that would place the very fact of hermaphrodism under the sign of criminality; we are far, too, from the later principle that will posit that each individual has one and only one sex, which is determined solely by nature’ (51). By juxtaposing these ‘disparate regimes’, Foucault renders the ‘truths’ of sexuality—and ‘hermaphrodism’—contingent; his genealogical method aims to show how this modern ‘principle … that each individual has one and only one sex’ was constructed, piecemeal, from a ‘disparate’ array of historical accidents.

Another part of Foucault’s story, another ‘disparate regime’, concerns the longstanding association between ‘hermaphrodites’ and ‘monsters’. Beyond the juridical domain, Foucault notes that French medicine and popular culture tended, contemporaneously, to figure the ‘hermaphrodite’ as ‘the privileged example of the monster’ (56). The ‘hermaphrodite’ represented the ultimate monster insofar as the realm of the monstrous contained all those beings that ‘mix and confuse, in one individual, what ought to remain separate’ (55). Framed as the conflation of two sexes in one individual, the ‘hermaphrodite’ was seen as monstrous by nature. All the more so as sex was seen as ‘a “nature” in itself’: ‘One does not have a sex, one is of a sex, as one is of a nature: strong, warm, dry, bold, vigorous, hotheaded, quick to anger and to combat, apt at commanding, etc.; or weak, cold, humid, timid, phlegmatic, slow, ready to submit, etc.’ (57). Where the law treated sex as a kind of ‘name’ or identification, sex functioned more as a ‘nature’ in these other ‘disparate regimes’. Hence Foucault claims that while the law tended to treat the ‘hermaphrodite’ as a figure of lack—the lack of a proper sex identity—other domains treated the ‘hermaphrodite’ more as a figure of excess, as ‘the inextricable coexistence of natures rather than the absence of distinctive signs’ (64). But whether characterized as excess or as lack, the ‘sex [of the “hermaphrodite”] is never defined as one or the other sex’; it always contained too much or too little sexual difference (64).

According to Foucault, this all started to change in the 17^th century. He claims that in law as in medicine, the question aimed at ‘hermaphrodites’ shifted, toward determining which of the two sexes one really belonged to. He locates the 1601 trial of Marie Le Marcis as marking an important rupture; while the defendant had followed all the traditional protocols—having been baptized as a girl, before adopting the name ‘Marin’ and choosing to marry ‘as a man’—they were nevertheless sentenced to death for living with a woman, ‘as a woman’. When Marie/Marin appealed this sentence, they were subject to one medical examination after another; doctors and lawyers asked: ‘what is the real sex that is hidden within this apparent hermaphrodite? Is this, in fact, a man or a woman?’ (69). Foucault highlights this trial as a break with earlier approaches to the ‘hermaphrodite’—no longer is the ‘hermaphrodite’ given any ‘freedom’ (however limited) to ‘choose’ their sex, nor are they seen as a truly ‘monstrous’ combination of both sexes. Whereas monstrosity ‘implied a total disruption of the human form’ beyond all recognition, hermaphrodism came to be seen as merely a ‘partial modification’ of the sexual organs or other psycho-somatic sexual characteristics, an aberration which did not change the fact that one still had one—and only one—true sex (73). And so ‘medicine tends to abandon the theme of the confusion of natures, to turn toward the search for the identifying sex [du sexe identificateur]. But this identifying sex is not, like that of the jurists, the result of a decision that mandates; it is established in terms of truth; only an examination can define it, with all the possible potentials for uncertainty and error’ (73). Henceforth sex is a problem of truth—a truth to be determined by medicine, and later by comparative anatomy, embryology, psychiatry, and other sciences.

Crucially, this is also where Les hermaphrodites pinpoints the historical emergence of modern sexuality. ‘What will soon be called “sexuality”’ first emerged through this juridico-medical search for the hermaphrodite’s true sex, which would lie hidden beneath the appearances of the other sex. To determine the true sex of any given ‘hermaphrodite’, jurists and doctors would look at how their whole ‘ensemble of elements, organs, functions, and behaviors’ expressed the characteristics of one sex or the other (77). Increasingly in the 18^th century, sexuality came to be constituted as the ‘manifestation, the physical instrumentation’ of sex, as an ‘organic ensemble of elements, of forms and of functions; but an ensemble, equally, of sensibilities, impressions, penchants, movements of the body and affections of the soul’ (83). Foucault’s elaboration on the relations between sex and sexuality seems all the more pertinent, given his influence on feminist and queer theory, as he goes on to assert that this modern construction of sexuality did not develop around men—for the precise reason that ‘for man, his sex is [the] sex [le sexe] par excellence; and in the act of copulation, it finds its function, its end, and its accomplishment. And sexuality, as an intermediary and relatively autonomous dimension, can only appear in those for whom the determination of sex does not play an exhaustive role’ (85). There are essays to be written, no doubt, on this reformulation of sex as masculine (or phallic?), constituted over and against an indeterminate, feminized sexuality. All the more so as Foucault goes on to identify three subjects around which the history of sexuality would take shape:

Either their sex does not constitute [the] sex—and they are women. Or their sex is not yet capable of the only legitimate copulative act—and they are children. Or their sex is indistinct and their body, their ways of being, their sensations and their penchants get away from the identity of their sex—and they are hermaphrodites. Men essentially have a sex (the sex), women, children, and hermaphrodites have a sexuality that must be sought out, to anticipate and rediscover the sex in relation to which they are insufficient, lacking, uncertain. Man is the legal subject in the imperious order of sex; women, children, and hermaphrodites are the bearers of sexuality in the fragile order of nature. (85-86)

I cite this passage at length, both because it brings out an attention to patriarchy that some have found lacking in Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and because it departs from Volume I, which specifies four different ‘figures’ as the primary ‘targets and anchorage points’ for the historical production of sexuality: that is, ‘the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult’.^[3] Though some ‘hermaphrodites’ might be subsumed under that last category, Foucault’s turn toward specifying the ‘hermaphrodite’ as one of the central ‘bearers of sexuality’ marks a significant development that warrants further study.

Les hermaphrodites proceeds to elaborate how, across 18^th and 19^th-century medicine, science and law, the ‘hermaphrodite’ came to figure ‘the pervert “in the flesh,” perversion visible and incarnate’ (112). In science and medicine, the ‘hermaphrodite’ was increasingly defined as a deviation from the ‘normal’ course of human sexual development, in relation to embryology and comparative anatomy (99). Like other figures Foucault examines in his Abnormal lectures (1974-75), the ‘hermaphrodite’ would be ‘arrested’ at some archaic stage of human evolution, particularly at ‘the archaic stages of sexual indifferentiation through which he [any given individual] has passed’ (99). Here Foucault refers to the popular scientific theory of originary bisexuality, which held that all humans are sexually undifferentiated at conception and must progressively take on the physical and psychic features of the male/female sex (or sexualities?). Vis-à-vis this ‘normal’ trajectory of sexuality, the ‘hermaphrodite’ would remain stuck at a primitive, less differentiated stage, and for this reason they would figure the model ‘degenerate’. All manner of other sexual ‘perversions’ then came to be described through the lexicon of ‘hermaphrodism’, as ‘the bipolarity of the masculine and the feminine serves to decode not only aberrant bodies, but anomalies of conduct: indifferentiation of instinct, ambivalence of affect, “inversion” of sensations and sentiments, “psychic hermaphrodism”’ (102). Foucault highlights two key consequences. On the one hand, medicine increasingly came to suggest that there was no true ‘hermaphrodite’ that would belong to both sexes in equal measure; there was no real ‘hermaphrodism of sex’, because one always had more characteristics of one sex than the other. Yet at the same time, ‘hermaphrodism of sexuality’ was not only well recognized as a possible condition, but it was established as the condition in relation to which ‘inverts’ or homosexuals, ‘transvestites’ and other sexual ‘abnormals’ would be constructed. And so ‘there coexisted a critique of “true” hermaphrodism and a use of hermaphrodism as the grid of analysis for reality’ (102-103).

As in medicine, so too in law. Foucault suggests that this new conception of hermaphrodism entered the juridical domain through a number of cases in which husbands filed for divorce on the grounds that their spouses did not truly belong to the opposite sex, because their ‘wives’ were really men under (pseudo)hermaphroditic guise. Foucault goes so far as to claim: ‘What is at stake in these affairs of hermaphrodism, which are relatively common in the jurisprudence and medical literature of the 19^th century, is fundamentally the introduction of sexuality, with its variations, into a juridical system that only understood the difference of the sexes’ (107). In law as in medicine, Foucault marks a difference between sex and sexuality; with the historical introduction of the latter, the courts will demand ever-more exhaustive examinations to determine a hermaphrodite’s true sex, and they will no longer offer ‘hermaphrodites’ any choice in the matter. If one effect was that the law gained greater jurisdiction over a wider realm of sexual acts and relations—even intercourse between married individuals was now subject to scrutiny, lest one partner betray symptoms of (pseudo)hermaphrodism—this move was justified in the name of sexual health, to ward off the ‘diffuse biological danger’ represented by (pseudo)hermaphrodism (111). Once more, ‘this grid of analysis [champ de pertinence], which sets up the legitimate need for natural [sexual] relations in confrontation with the displacements or lacunas of masculinity and femininity, the multiple biological dangers and the crises [urgences] of public order—this is the normative domain of sexuality’ (111). Hermaphrodism thus occupies a central place in the history of biopolitics, or the relations of power that regulate sexuality as a matter of public order and life itself.

Here, Foucault highlights how hermaphrodism became a paradigmatic figure of sexual ‘danger’, as scientific theories of ‘degeneracy’ came to justify laws that framed (pseudo) hermaphrodites—alongside their partners in crime, homosexuals and ‘transvestites’—as threatening the sexual norms constitutive of modern civilization. ‘Dangerous, the hermaphrodite must be “neutralized.” And in the strongest sense of the word, insofar as they constitute the highest and most visible form, the anatomical and physiological emblem of all the perversions’ (115). Neutralized, the ‘hermaphrodite’ would embody a kind of sexual ‘neutrality’, which ‘should put them out of sexual life altogether’ (115). Particularly as sexologists moved to pin down ever-finer categories or degrees of (pseudo)hermaphrodism, hermaphrodites were set apart from ‘normal’ sexuality and so sequestered in their new identities—neutralized and neutered (often literally). Toward the end of the unfinished manuscript, Foucault observes that, in this way, the theme of monstrosity was eventually ‘reactivated’—only this is ‘no longer the old monstrosity of one and the other, but the monstrosity of neither one nor the other’ (115). Neither one sex nor the other, the specter of monstrosity resurges, haunting medical and juridical constructions of (pseudo)hermaphrodites across the 19^th century.

Les hermaphrodites ends here. We can only imagine how Foucault’s history of ‘hermaphrodism’ might have continued, had he completed it. How else might he have elaborated on the relations between ‘hermaphrodism’ and the history of sexuality? Might he have taken into account the first-person testimonies of ‘hermaphrodites’ like Herculine Barbin? And how might he have understood the changes that the concept of (pseudo)hermaphrodism would undergo in the 20^th century? Éric Fassin broaches this last question in his postface to Les hermaphrodites, where he writes: ‘Far from continuing the logic of the “true sex,” the new paradigm that prevailed from the middle of the 20^th century depends on the “better sex”’ (150). As ‘hermaphrodism’ became ‘intersex’ identity, medicine and psychiatry became less concerned with determining the ‘true sex’ of intersex bodies than they were with prescribing hormonal and surgical treatments in order to bring such bodies closer to the ‘better sex’ for them. In dialogue with feminist and queer theory, Fassin convincingly argues that medical experimentation on intersex children was the historical context in which ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ were first defined, by mid-century sexologists and psychiatrists like Robert Stoller and John Money. This postface illumines how the history that Foucault recounts in Les hermaphrodites remains relevant for the history that ensues, as the histories of hermaphrodism and sexuality continually precondition the histories of intersex and gender—even if Foucault stopped short of narrating much of the latter histories.

Nevertheless, it is perhaps unsurprising to find Les hermaphrodites somewhat disappointing or even deficient, as a contemporary reader of trans and intersex studies as well as Foucault and Foucault studies. For starters, some readers may be offput by Foucault’s generally uncritical use of the pejorative term, ‘hermaphrodism’, in the title and throughout the text. One could ask whether Foucault downplays the violence of not only this hegemonic discourse, but moreover its lethal historical force. In an attempt to critique narratives of progress, Foucault claims at one point that the treatment of ‘hermaphrodites’ in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was not as harsh as it has been made out, in comparison with the purported ‘tolerance’ of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In effect, he risks understating the violence directed at this category throughout Renaissance France. I am particularly unconvinced by Foucault’s reasoning that ‘hermaphrodites’ were not executed for the sole fact of being ‘hermaphrodites’, on the grounds that such executions only occurred when an individual’s ‘hermaphrodism’ was linked to other crimes—Foucault’s example is intercourse with Satan. While this qualification may hold true on the surface of juridical discourse, it seems that this detail failed, nevertheless, to save those ‘hermaphrodites’ who were hung or burned at the stake on such grounds (i.e., having had intercourse with Satan). My suspicion is not only that Foucault risks overlooking the persistence of this violence at certain moments in Les hermaphrodites, but that such violence may be even more integral to the concept of ‘hermaphrodism’ than the manuscript understands.

Relatedly, scholars in intersex studies have also pushed back against the tendency to narrate this history from the top down, and it is true that in Les hermaphrodites, Foucault only analyzes how ‘hermaphrodites’ were defined by others; not a single text written by a ‘hermaphroditic’ or intersex subject is cited.^[4] Little doubt, this may speak to the limits of the archive, which is unlikely to contain many such documents.^[5] Yet Foucault’s introduction to Herculine Barbin’s memoirs, which he likely wrote around the same time as Les hermaphrodites, demonstrates that some texts authored by ‘hermaphrodites’ were extant. What does it mean to exclude these texts from consideration? Though Foucault might well have turned to Barbin—or others—had he finished Les hermaphrodites, it is difficult not to wonder what this exclusion means for the text as it survives today. How might this history of hermaphrodism look different if it were to consider discourses by historical ‘hermaphrodites’ themselves, and not only discourses about them?

On the flip side, Les hermaphrodites might also be read as complicating the assumptive logics of voluntaristic agency, autonomy, and subjectivity that undergird much work in trans and intersex studies. Juliana Gleeson’s Hermaphrodite Logic, for instance, claims that ‘intersex people were first brought into full public view not by a biology seminar, but a political movement”—that is, by intersex activism in the 1990s.^[6] Like many scholars of intersex and trans studies, Gleeson wants to claim a respectable provenance for modern intersex identity—to make the concept politically good, she cleaves it from ‘biology’; she claims intersex as the product and property of ‘intersex people’ themselves. Foucault’s genealogy troubles any such separation between intersex subjectivity and biological history, particularly as he shows how ‘hermaphrodites’ loomed large in public consciousness long before the 1990s. What Foucault might have shown in Les hermaphrodites, indeed what he starts to show in his introduction to Barbin’s memoirs, is that the discourses through which sexual ‘abnormals’ know ourselves are never fully extricable from the dominant relations of knowledge and power within (and against) which we speak. Even for readers in 2026, Foucault invites us to rethink how power returns in and through the terms of resistance, cautioning against the impulse to celebrate repressed discourses as omniscient guides to ‘liberation’.

Ironically, that very impulse was the target of Judith Butler’s critique of Foucault in Gender Trouble, where they assert that his introduction to Barbin’s memoir appears to ‘romanticize’ Barbin’s ‘hermaphroditic’ existence as ‘the happy limbo of a non-identity’, and so ‘he fails to recognize the concrete relations of power that both construct and condemn Herculine’s sexuality’.^[7] Foucault would thereby indulge in ‘the very emancipatory discourse his analysis in The History of Sexuality was meant to displace’ (123). An essay (or more!) remains to be written on how Les hermaphrodites complicates Butler’s influential critique. At first glance, we could say that Les hermaphrodites certainly does not bear out Butler’s charge that Foucault imagines the body or the pleasures of ‘hermaphrodites’ to be pre-discursive; his entire project is to trace how the ‘hermaphrodite’ became associated with sexual indifferentiation or ‘non-identity’ through a historical process, replete with disparate regimes of power-knowledge. (It’s also worth noting that, in context, Foucault only refers to Barbin’s childhood years as the ‘happy limbo of a non-identity’ rather ironically, so as to highlight how Barbin’s educational milieu—an all-girls’ school—failed to question her sex/sexuality.) In other words, ‘non-identity’ is no ahistoric or utopic ideal; rather, it is the historically contingent position that ‘hermaphrodites’ occupy in a particular regime of power-knowledge.

This is only to scratch the surface of the debates that Les hermaphrodites may (re)ignite in queer, trans, and intersex studies, and beyond. Other readers may raise still other concerns. There are times when this reader questioned the neatness of Foucault’s historiography, wherein clean historical breaks sit uneasily alongside slippery historical periodizations. On the one hand, Foucault tends to separate out successive historical constructions of hermaphrodism, which are described as so different that the 16^th-century conception, for instance, would no longer be intelligible to the 17^th century. While Les hermaphrodites marks the 17^th century, in particular, as an absolute break with Renaissance notions of the ‘hermaphrodite’ (as a ‘monstrous’ double being), Foucault seems to waver at other moments, suggesting that the same old Renaissance debates went on in some corners of 17^th-century law or medicine. Beyond the historical ambiguity of the 17^th century, the question arises: what is it that persisted across these epochs, which would allow them to be intelligible to one another in some way—intelligible enough, at least, for Foucault to be able to write about other epistemes? In particular, how did the charge of monstrosity or sexual transgression persist across historical periods? This historical slipperiness also raises the broader question of how Foucault understands epistemic breaks, or grapples with difference within one and the same episteme. What if (different forces within) the 17^th-century episteme ‘knew’ the ‘hermaphrodite’ as both a ‘double being’ with two sexes and as an ‘abnormal’ individual with a hidden ‘true sex’? In these ways, Les hermaphrodites raises many of the same questions about historicism that have dogged Foucault’s work, at least since History of Madness and Foucault’s ensuing debate with Jacques Derrida.

Les hermaphrodites also raises questions about how the History of Sexuality interfaces with the histories and historiographies of race. Though race does not appear explicitly in the body of the text, Foucault’s (relatively brief) references to comparative anatomy and theories of ‘degeneracy’ gesture toward race science and its role in the French histories of sexuality. The absent presence of race in Les hermaphrodites might invite contemporary readers to probe how sexologists and psychiatrists construed the ‘biological danger’ of hermaphrodism as ‘degenerate’ in relation to racialized measures of sexual development and civilization. This is a question I pursue in my own book project, where I argue that 19^th and 20^th-century sexologists constructed modern homosexual and trans identities—or ‘pseudo-hermaphrodites’—as ‘degenerate’ European subjects who regressed toward a less differentiated, more ‘primitive’ state of sexuality that had long been associated with ‘lesser races’. Perhaps this starts to explain the allusion to ‘Africa’ that does appear in Les hermaphrodites: in one footnote, Foucault (citing Georges Canguilhem) recounts that Scipion Dupleix, a 16^th-century French historian, ‘attributed the frequency of monsters in Africa to the mixture of species around rare water sources’ (59). How, then, might European histories of sexual monstrosity reflect the racialization of Africa as a monstrous continent, in the wake of racial slavery and colonialism?

I hope it is clear that I do not invoke these potential critiques to twit Foucault, or to propose a ‘critique of the injustices of the past by a truth held by men’—or anyone else—‘in the present’.^[8] Rather than merely ‘correct’ Foucault, our critiques might unravel some of the lines of questioning opened up, and left open, by Les hermaphrodites. How does this unfinished manuscript disrupt our present ‘knowledge’ of the history of sexuality, in Foucault and beyond? And what work remains to be done, to disrupt the relations of power and knowledge that we might share with Foucault—as well as those we no longer share? What is certain is that Les hermaphrodites is essential reading for scholars of Foucault, gender, and sexuality.

1. All translations of Les hermaphrodites are my own. ↑

2. Michel Foucault, ‘Introduction’ in Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (Pantheon Books, NY, 1980), vii. ↑

3. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (Pantheon Books, NY, 1978), 105. ↑

4. See, for instance, Juliana Gleeson’s Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation. ↑

5. On the limits of the archive (both as a literal matter of what gets preserved in historical records, and as a conceptual matter of the historical a priori), see Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. See also Lynne Huffer’s elaboration of the ‘archive’ in Foucault’s Strange Eros. ↑

6. Juliana Gleeson, Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation (Verso Books, New York and London, 2025), ix. ↑

7. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, New York and London, 1999), 120. ↑

8. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Pantheon Books, New York, 1984), 97. ↑