Queer Vitalism through the Modes of Resistance: Reading Herculine Barbin’s Memoir as Intersex Testimony in Nineteenth--Century France

Abstract (English)

Human experiences are often shaped and conditioned by dominant structures of “knowledge and power” forces that determine right and wrong beyond the realm of individual perception. The modern quest for truth has led to the hierarchical organization of knowledge, wherein Michel Foucault asserts, power and knowledge are not independent entities: “the exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge, and knowledge constantly generates power effects” (Foucault, 1975) This interdependence becomes critical in understanding how certain bodies particularly queer are subject to regimes of classification, pathologization, and control.
This paper examines Memoir of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, authored by Herculine Barbin, widely regarded as the first documented intersex memoir. Rediscovered and introduced by Foucault, Barbin's narrative stands at the intersection of the 19th century disciplinary discourses—medicine, law, and religion—that sought to regulate bodies through the lens of deviance. Born intersex and assigned female at birth, Barbin experienced life largely uninterrupted until the interference of the Christian institution and medical apparatus in the alignment of her bodies. This unusual disparity leads to her medical and legal reclassification as male, illustrating how normative regimes categorized lives as deviant and abnormal.
While the memoir illustrates how necropolitical regimes decide which lives are allowed to thrive and which are marked for death (Mbembe, 2003), this paper focuses on how the act of narration itself emerges as an instance of queer vitalism. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the “affect alien,” I argue that Barbin positioned herself outside the norms of happiness and social intelligibility, occupying a space of alienation that paradoxically enables change. Her desire to write and document her lived experience becomes an act of queer vitalism, even as it narrates despair and death.
Thus, the memoir is not simply a record of suffering but an affective archive of resistance—one that reclaims the erased presence of intersex lives in early modernity. This paper interprets Barbin’s narrative as a deeply personal, embodied defiance of the systems that sought to pathologize her, contributing to broader discourses on queer representation, historical memory and queer futurity.