Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T09:09:36.851Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Invention of the Neuter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Laure Murat

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The third sex, which for a long period of history meant the androgyne and the homosexual, took on a new sense around 1900, when it was applied to emancipated women, who were featured by novelists and analysed by psychiatrists. Assimilated with lesbians, ‘desexualized’ by their modern way of life, they were labelled ‘neuter’, worker bees in a hive-state where ‘female-male’ markers were tending to disappear. Neither men in sex, nor women in gender (at least according to traditional assumptions), they constituted a new ‘battalion’ which highlighted all the anxieties of the time: the involution of dimorphism, the threat of lack of differentiation and the ‘extinction of the race’. But for those who accepted the label, neuterdom evolved from a pejorative concept into an instrument of a kind of liberation and the strategic means to set up creative space cleared of sexual stigma, until political cooption, aware of the resurgence of a ‘superior species’, changed its meaning and tipped over into the worst sort of excess.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , November 2005 , pp. 61 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2005

References

Apollinaire, Guillaume (1994) Œuvres poétiques[Poetic Works]. Paris: Gallimard, 'Bibliothèque de la Pléiade'.Google Scholar
d'Aurevilly, Barbey, Jules-Amédée, (1878) Les Bas-bleus[The Blue-Stockings]. Paris: Victor Palmé (reprint Geneva: Slatkine, 1968).Google Scholar
Bard, Christine (1995) Les Filles de Marianne, Histoire des féminismes 1914–1940[Marianne's Daughters, a History of the Feminist Movement 1914–1940]. Paris: Fayard.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland (2002) Le Neutre[The Neutral], Cours au Collège de France (1977–1978), text established, annotated and presented by Clerc, Thomas. Paris: Seuil/IMEC.Google Scholar
Bourdet, Edouard (1926) La Prisonnière. Paris: Librairie Théstrale.Google Scholar
Bryher, (1948) Beowulf, preface by Adrienne Monnier, trans. from the English into French by Morvan, Hélène. Paris: Mercure de France.Google Scholar
Cahun, Claude (1930) Aveux non avenus[Unwelcome Confessions]. Paris: Éditions Carrefour.Google Scholar
Chevalier, Dr Julien (1893) Une maladie de la personnalité: l'inversion sexuelle[An Illness of the Personality: Sexual Inversion]. Lyon: A. Storck; Paris: Masson.Google Scholar
Deraismes, Maria (1891) 'Les femmes en culottes' [Women in Britches], L'Echo de Paris, 13 October.Google Scholar
Ellis, Havelock (1915) Sexual Inversion: Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1. Philadelphia (first published as Sexual Inversion, 1897).Google Scholar
Estève, Louis (1927a) L'Énigme de l'androgyne[The Androgyne Puzzle]. Paris: Éditions du monde moderne.Google Scholar
Estève, Louis (1927b) Introduction to Willy, Le Troisième Sexe[The Third Sex]. Paris-Edition.Google Scholar
Joran, Théodore (1908) Au cœur du féminisme[Inside Feminism]. Paris: Savaète.Google Scholar
Monnier, Adrienne (1989) Rue de l'Odéon (1960). Paris: Albin Michel.Google Scholar
Joséphin, Péladan (1910) De l'androgyne, théorie plastique. Paris: E. Sansot.Google Scholar
Rey, Alain and Rey-Debove, Josette, eds (1993) Le Petit Robert, revised and expanded. Paris: Le Robert.Google Scholar
Roellig, Ruth Margarete (2001) Les Lesbiennes de Berlin; preface by Magnus Hirschfeld, notes and trans. Adam, Charles. Lille: Cahiers GayKitschCamp (original German edn 1928, Berlins lesbische Frauen, Naunhof b. Leipzig: Gebauer).Google Scholar
Spiess, Camille (1938) Mon autopsie, Éjaculations autobiographies. Nice: Éditions Athanor.Google Scholar
Stronach, Alice (1901) A Newnham Friendship. London: Blackie.Google Scholar
Von Wolzogen, Ernst Ludwig, (1904) Le Troisième sexe[The Third Sex], trans. from German into French by Karageorgevitch, Prince B.. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 3rd edn (1st edn 1902).Google Scholar