New by Gabrielle HOUBRE
Papers by Gabrielle HOUBRE
Médecine/Sciences, 2022
Si la transidentité est un impensé du xix e siècle, on peut toutefois découvrir dans des archives... more Si la transidentité est un impensé du xix e siècle, on peut toutefois découvrir dans des archives inédites des existences transgenres, et ce, dans tous les milieux sociaux. L'intensité performative qui les caractérise se lit dans l'apparence physique recomposée à l'aide du vêtement et de la coupe de cheveux, mais plus encore à travers la capacité à intégrer au quotidien la sociabilité du genre choisi. Elle frappe, notamment chez les plus humbles, par sa plénitude et sa durée, par son caractère irrévocable quand il n'est pas contraint, par l'audace et la liberté qui la nourrissent. Elle invite à prendre en considération la projection dans l'autre sexe, non pas seulement comme une opportunité, mais comme une impérieuse exigence.
Cet essai contextualise l'autobiographie d'Adélaïde Herculine dite Alexina et devenue Abel Barbi... more Cet essai contextualise l'autobiographie d'Adélaïde Herculine dite Alexina et devenue Abel Barbin (1838-1868) en la replaçant dans l'histoire de ce que les médecins ont appelé "les erreurs de sexe" qualifiant ainsi les personnes "hermaphrodites" présentant une discordance entre leur sexe biologique et leur sexe social au XIXe siècle.
Same-sex marriage, made legal in France by a vote of the National Assembly on 23 April 2013, has ... more Same-sex marriage, made legal in France by a vote of the National Assembly on 23 April 2013, has surprising judicial resonances in the nineteenth century. In fact, courts of that time repeatedly had to rule on requests for marriage annulment by husbands and wives complaining of having been deceived concerning the true sex of their spouses. The legal pretext – mistaken identity – was based on divergent interpretations of the sex of the offending spouse because of biological characteristics argued to be insufficiently clear to establish the sexual alterity required by the institution of marriage. 1 The focus of these trials, especially between 1816 and 1884 when divorce was impossible, was therefore to evaluate the degree of irregularity of genital formation, which might or might not call into question the legal sex of the accused spouse and thus the marriage. 2 Unusual and scandalous, these trials caused a great stir well beyond the localities in which they took place, as well as sparking open and sometimes heated debates between jurists and physicians. The judges, discomfited by cases that revolved around suspect genital organs, sometimes decided to appeal to medical expertise and to consider biological factors, even after legislators had expunged this possibility from the Civil Code of 1804. In effect, contrary to older law, the new Code – which at the request of the emperor Napoleon compiled laws pertaining to persons, property and relationships between private persons – abolished impotence as a definitive obstacle to marriage. 3 The magistrates thus encountered the growing interest of physicians in individuals whose morphology, physiology and behaviour complicated a clear division between the male and female sexes. Twenty-three such cases handled by French civil courts between 1808 – after the promulgation of the Civil Code – and 1903 – the date of a judgement of the Court of Cassation that set a long-lasting precedent in the matter – are examined here. Exhumed from court records, along with other traces of the lives of the protagonists whenever possible, they reveal men and women assaulted at the most intimate level under the harsh light of the courtroom, in the name of an exclusive binary definition
« Madame Gautier, visible les mardis, mercredis, jeudis et vendredis, de midi à 6 heures. », Prostitutions. Des représentations aveuglantes, dir. Gabrielle Houbre, Isolde Pludermacher et Marie Robert, Mook Musée d’Orsay/ Flammarion, septembre 2015, p. 115-121.
Linguagens e Narrativas. Desafios Feministas ; p. 283-300, Dec 2014
Sexuality at the Fin-de-siecle*, dir. Peter Cryle et Cristopher Fourth, p. 61-76., 2008
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New by Gabrielle HOUBRE
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