Graduate Scholars Colloquium: Herculine Barbin: Memoir and Palimpsest

The Graduate Scholars Colloquium provides a site of vibrant intellectual exchange and engagement for graduate students across the disciplines engaged in the study of gender and its multiple social, cultural, political and material implications. Dinner is served. Please RSVP to maryann.murtagh@duke.edu.

This colloquium is presented by Laurel Iber, PhD candidate, Romance Studies Department presents "Herculine Barbin: Memoir and Palimpsest", response by Suzanne Le Men, PhD candidate Romance Studies Departmentan &African American Studies Department, Program in Dance, Theartre Studies

Nineteenth-century 'hermaphrodite' Herculine Barbin's memoirs operate as a sort of palimpsest, as her/his narrative becomes subject to a process of effacement and reinscription. Through a series of documents, images, and texts-produced by medico-legal professionals, members of the press, and writers of fiction-each new representation reframes and reinterprets the facts of Barbin's existence. "Herculine Barbin: Memoir and Palimpsest" examines the political, ideological, and aesthetic dimensions of these
interventions, including that of Michel Foucault, from the 19th century through the 21st.