Abstract

Michel Foucault has dealt little with gender and women’s issues, but he has devoted considerable attention to a dimension of the “confusionµ of the sexes that might at first sight seem marginal for the construction of a historical discourse on sexuality: the hermaphroditism. In Foucault’s archives, deposited in 2013 at the National Library of France (box 82, NAF 28730), one can find an unpublished manuscript on hermaphrodites. In the present article, I would like to take up some of the problematic questions outlined in this unpublished text, analyzing in particular the different regimes of truth for hermaphrodites between the classical and modern ages, between a legal and a medical-psychological paradigm of the «confusion» of the sexes. This analysis will thus open two more general questions: how does this discourse on hermaphroditism represent an important element in the broader Foucauldian project of a history of sexuality? And above all, how does it allow to think anew about the question of subjectivity through the history of sexual subjects and their sexes, outlining new genealogies of gender divisions and issues?