GENDER TROUBLE 159

Gender Trouble
always produced or constructed within specific historical practices,
both discursive and institutional, and that recourse to a sexuality
before the law is an illusory and complicitous conceit of emancipatory
sexual politics.
The journals of Herculine provide the opportunity to read
Foucault against himself, or, perhaps more appropriately, to expose the
constitutive contradiction of this kind of anti-emancipatory call for
sexual freedom. Herculine, called Alexina throughout the text, narrates a story about h/er tragic plight as one who lives a life of unjust
victimization, deceit, longing, and inevitable dissatisfaction. From the
time s/he was a young girl, s/he reports, s/he was different from the
other girls. This difference is a cause for alternating states of anxiety
and self-importance through the story, but it is there as tacit knowledge before the law becomes an explicit actor in the story. Although
Herculine does not report directly on h/er anatomy in the journals,
the medical reports that Foucault publishes along with Herculine’s
own text suggest that Herculine might reasonably be said to have what
is described as either a small penis or an enlarged clitoris, that where
one might expect to find a vagina one finds a “cul-de-sac,” as the doctors put it, and, further, that she doesn’t appear to have identifiably
female breasts. There seems also to be some capacity for ejaculation
that is not fully accounted for within the medical documents.
Herculine never refers to anatomy as such, but relates h/er predicament in terms of a natural mistake, a metaphysical homelessness, a
state of insatiable desire, and a radical solitariness that, before h/er
suicide, is transformed into a full-blown rage, first directed toward
men, but finally toward the world as such.
Herculine relates in elliptical terms h/er relations with the girls at
school, the “mothers” at the convent, and finally h/er most passionate
attachment with Sara who becomes h/er lover. Plagued first with guilt
and then with some unspecified genital ailment, Herculine exposes
h/er secret to a doctor and then a priest, a set of confessional acts that
effectively force h/er separation from Sara. Authorities confer and
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