First & One of a kind.

In Herculine Barbin, Michael Foucault shares Alexina Barbin’s personal memoir that details her life as woman and later as a man in order to illustrate how language shapes our society and places power in the hands of those who control the language. However, when you focus on Alexina’s personal journey as well as her transition from a woman to a male, I believe that despite her poor mental state that in some ways her memoir is a trailblazing text in relation to the intersex community. Alexina’s decision to document everything that happened to her and reveal it to society is astounding. This includes her loved ones, friends, church, and doctors. In the end she offers herself as a sort of example in order to possibly give her society a chance to learn and hopefully treat those who follow her better than she was treated. Finally, Alexina’s realization, despite her poor mental health, that she is ostracized because of the narrow-minded and rigid thinking of the society she lives in is a stark contrast to what many intersex and LGBT people feel, which is self-hate. Instead, Alexina’s commit’s suicide because of the disgust she feels for the society she is in and the place that society has made for her. Despite her tragic end, Alexina’s memoir is empowering towards intersex individuals because she was not afraid to speak out and realized that the problem was not who she was, but society’s inability and refusal to understand who she was.

In most cases, people commit suicide because of feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, and excreta. However in Alexina’s case, she takes her own life after the realization that the pain she endured and her lack of identity is only caused by society’s negligence and not necessarily because of her intersex identification. Speaking on society she says “You are pitied more than, I perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep” (Page 99). In this quote Alexina seems to be noting that because of her society’s refusal to free themselves of the boundaries they have created for themselves, they are unable and too narrow minded to attain the greater knowledge that she has attained. In its ambiguity, I would go as far as to claim that the knowledge that she thinks she has attained is the knowledge that she does not have to be male or female to find self-worth, and in addition that society places barriers on themselves because they lack the confidence or ability to live without personal markers such as gender, race, occupation and other identifiers that appear to give value to people. Although Alexina’s point is debatable, her overall attitude is an example for all people shunned from society. Alexina is able to realize that despite her differences from the basic definition of man or woman she still deserves a place in the world, and the only reason she doesn’t have one is because of our small mindedness. This is a message that would be extremely helpful to those that struggle to find a place within society because of their intersex or LGBT identity.

When people defy the markers that society sets for individuals, they are often ostracized and ridiculed. Because of this, many people that condescend conventions (such as intersex and LGBT individuals) often are afraid to share who they are out of shame or fear that they will be remembered sourly. On the other hand, Alexina was willing to speak out about what she went through, who she was, and the things that were done to her. In modern time most cultures are more accepting and there is more support for people who are open about their intersex or LGBT identity. However, in the time period Alexina intersex was still a largely unknown and unspoken phenomenon. Her willingness to let us in on everything she was and went through is a bold move whether she would have been there to take the ridicule or not. Her case was probably not the first of her kind but she knew she was the first to reveal it, and had a hope that the next time somebody like her appeared before their friends, colleagues, family, and doctors that it would be different. She is aware that her memoirs as well as her body will be examined by people, and offers herself as a sort of sacrifice in order to help those that come after her. “When that day comes a few doctors will make a little stir around my corpse; they will shatter all the extinct mechanisms of its impulses, will draw new information from it, will analyze all the mysterious sufferings that were heaped up on a single human being” (Page 103). Alexina is aware that she will become an example, and does not have any quarrel with it. In fact, she states later on that she hopes that they do so that they can discover what she has been through throughout her life. “Then they shall give thought to the poor wretch, whom during his life, they shamefully rejected, blushing sometimes when they clasped his hand, to whom they even refused bread and the very right to live!” (Page 104). Alexina knows that because she is the first that in her lifetime she will never be accepted by the majority. However, she offers herself as an example to the doctors and to everyone that is aware of her current situation in the hope that anyone with a similar condition to her own will be treated more humanely than she was.

Alexina’s strength to leave her memoir in the open to be read and analyzed is remarkable. Her story and who she was both mentally and physically shatters the normal definitions of male and female. To go further, she is a trailblazer for intersex individuals long before the term intersex is coined.