Foucault’s Legacy: What the Hermaphrodites Teach Us Today

There was never a shortage of criticism. It may be warranted, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the case, but how could it have been otherwise for a thinker of Michel Foucault’s stature (1926-1984), who radically attacked and questioned the truth dispensed as normality? Foucault unsettled supposed truths wherever the question arose about what is healthy, sick, criminal, and crazy, or what should be considered sexually “normal”.
We should recall foundational works such as “Madness and Civilization,” “The Order of Things,” “Discipline and Punish,” and finally “Sexuality and Truth,” published as part of a six-volume study “The Will to Knowledge,” which, unfortunately, remained incomplete due to the author’s early death.
His influence remains palpable wherever contemporary debates address marginalization and stigmatization of social groups, and thus questions of cultural power. When an as-yet unknown manuscript from his estate surfaces, almost like a voice from beyond, it naturally prompts attention.

The Manuscript Was Discovered Only After Decades

In Suhrkamp Verlag, recently released: “The Hermaphrodites” — a title whose terminology clearly points to a historical vantage, for that wording is long past and has been replaced by intersex or intersexuality. Yet those who practice a kind of cultural archaeology, as Foucault did throughout his life, also convey that engaging with cultural history always involves a conceptual history and the perceptual shifts that accompany it. Foucault, in any case, often delivered stunning insights into the interrelations of culture, daily life, and political power.
The text under review here is, in fact, a discovery. For until now, Foucault’s reception had no knowledge of it. Although it was known that the author engaged with the topic of intersexuality, demonstrably through his publication of the life history of Herculine Barbin, an intersex person (published 1978 in France, German edition 1998 “Über Hermaphrodismus”). The topic also appeared on various occasions in his lectures. What exactly the author intended with the roughly 60-page manuscript, we do not know.
The term hermaphrodite is, as noted, a historical perception. Foucault was interested in its changes and the discursive shifts connected with it, beginning in the 16th century and ending in the 19th century. The result is indeed “pioneer-like” in character, as the foreword states.
The Boundaries of Human Understanding
That in itself is captivating reading, because it also describes the boundaries of our capacity to know, which shift as knowledge expands. Yet because cultural interpretive power intrudes everywhere, it ultimately always concerns questions of the aims of knowledge. However, the reading also shows how much the author’s conclusions about the relationship between gender and sexuality are, from today’s vantage point, already historical.
They fail to connect to the current discourse on intersexuality, which is, on one hand, long since shaped by activism from the intercommunity perspective, and on the other hand fatally affected by medicine and its heteronormatively “normalizing” interventions on intersex people. How Foucault’s statements on sexuality, especially with regard to trans issues, are at least provocative. No surprise that a jester in a review for the newspaper Die Welt quickly seized the chance and spoke of a “fundamental critique of today’s trans debate.” Such journalistic missteps cannot be laid at Foucault’s door, of course.
But what does this mean? For example: Foucault shows us how strongly society’s defense against the mingling of male and female has persisted for centuries and into our own time. This is initially and visibly true for intersex people, but ultimately also for trans people. The response then was horror. The unsettledness about gender ambiguity persisted into our time. In the same measure, gender duality was seen as insurmountable.

Genderless Pleasure

A not insignificant role in all this is played by sexuality. It acted as desire in determining the “true gender” and became a problem the moment the body was used in two ways — as a woman and as a man. This both/and was rejected as “sodomy” and punished. The idea that sexual practice was tied to a single gender led Foucault to intervene forcefully.
For him, desire is genderless; it is neither male nor female. Desire operates without identity papers; it simply happens between two people and is not the center of an identity. Right here, Foucault seems oddly detached from reality, for sexual desire is a spectrum with fairly clear preferences—and cis, trans, and intersex people make no difference in that respect. Desire itself may be genderless, but not necessarily the object of desire.
What was outside the scope of Foucault’s reflections is the issue of gender identity, that is, the knowledge of which gender we belong to. This awareness plays a decisive, indeed existential, role for both intersex and trans people. Foucault rebelled against such a notion, but probably mainly because he did not distinguish conceptually between gender and sexuality. Of course there is no “law of sexual identification,” since there is no causal link between gender identity on one side and sexuality and desire on the other, but there are certainly gender identifications.
Finally, a personal note: Michel Foucault stayed in West Berlin for a short time in 1977 and again in 1978. I was working then at “Chez Romy Haag,” and one evening I saw Foucault walking past our venue — that distinctive, clean-shaven head with glasses was hard to miss. He headed toward Motzstrasse, and I wondered why so many celebrities made their way to us, but not the expert in “sexual field research” who would stop by. Today I know, of course: the old problem of science is that it prefers to speak about us rather than with us. That is why our lived reality often remains absent from what they call their insights.