Uncertain Erotic: A Foucauldian Reading of Herculine Barbin

1. Uncertain Erotic: A Foucauldian Reading of Herculine Barbin Herculine’s Erotic Life: Homoeroticism and the Sexual Saturation of Pedagogy This author observes a situation that the surrounding helps forge the sexual disposition of Herculine: “While I have argued that the somatophobia of Western Christendom enabled Herculine to produce herself as a woman in a socio-historical moment that would have otherwise rejected such a production of self, it is worth considering how the single-sex character of the Catholic pedagogical environments in question also functioned to induce a host of sensual and erotic pleasures that Catholicism itself would persistently condemn….”

2. “…The unnamed, and indeed unnamable, nature of the erotics that suffused Herculine’s boarding schools in fact empowered Herculine (as an ambiguously sexed and apparently homosexual subject) to elaborate herself in ways that would have been deemed completely unacceptable in secular society… As stated earlier, Herculine’s religious and pedagogical homes were pervaded by a specifically woman-identified eroticism….”

3. Mélisse deems that the situation in the context is very special and not similar to the regular homosexual atmosphere which belongs to males: “…Some of these started and ended with chaste embraces. Others consisted of a more sustained and genitally-oriented sexual encounter….all of these behaviors can be seen as linked to one another by a certain erotic saturation of time and space….” Herculine herself also conveys a feeling that she is willing to accept this happening: “ I was not afraid at their side, and I was so happy when one of them, taking me on her knees, would offer her sweet face to kiss… Her bearing was proud and inspired respect. However, a more sympathetic, a more attractive face could not be seen. To look at her was to love her…”

4. Foucault’s viewpoint presented by the author : “ ‘Only a little waiting room separated my bedroom fomr hers, I was present in the morning when she arose, and that was always early, in the summer as in winter. Afterward, I dressed her and during this operation we would talk about all possible subjects. If a silence set in, I would innocently start admiring her The whiteness of her skin had no equal. It was impossible to imagine more graceful contours without being dazzled by them…’ The palpable eroticism of the above citation seems, once again, to confirm Foucault’s thesis that even the most disciplinary techniques of power, such as the hierarchical organization of human congress evinced above, produce manifold and often non-normative forms of erotic interplay….”