Dreger's analysis of the medical treatment of hermaphrodites is top notch. She shows that physicians invariably posited a couple of magnet rules: "one-body-one-sex" and heterosexuality. In the words of two French experts, "the possession of a [single] sex is a necessity of our social order…" (p. 30). Any ambiguity, to cite another, produces "grave social disorders" (p. 118), not least among them pederasty. While Dreger bases her discussion entirely on the medical literature, the social danger posed by hermaphrodites was a theme of broad cultural import. For example, in Henri d'Argis' Sodome, a novel published in 1888 with a laudatory preface by Paul Verlaine, the etiology of the hero's homosexuality is located in his youthful love for a painter, in appearance a woman, in reality a hermaphrodite. Such representations illustrate, perhaps even better than the medical discourse, Dreger's contention that "the hermaphrodite and the homosexual share a surprising amount of medical history" (p. 31).

There were, however, significant differences. Whereas the increasing medical attention paid to homosexuals enabled them, in some cases, to make claims for themselves as a group, hermaphrodites were, at best, able to profit from their plight as individuals only. In an interesting paradox, the virtual explosion of hermaphroditism led within decades to its "virtual extinction" (p. 153). The hermaphroditic body, which raised doubts "not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies," (p. 6) needed to be disappeared.


Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex

by
Alice Domurat Dreger

Publisher: Harvard University Press
Date: 1998
Paperback ISBN: 0674001893