TY - JOUR AU - Easton, Martha PY - 2010/09/02 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Herculine Barbin Paper Assignment JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/herculine-barbin-paper-assignment SP - AB - This is a paper assignment for the book Herculine Barbin, by Michel Foucault. This book is particularly interesting in that it shows the effect of competing definitions of gender. Herculine's life as an intersexual person raised as a girl in a Catholic convent school, then suddenly 'discovered' to be a man by a local doctor, is a fascinating view into how gender was defined differently by various institutions. Herculine's case, as Foucault points out, also highlights the rising power of medical science in the defining and gendering of human bodies. This assignment asks students to identify the competing narratives of gender in Herculine's life, and to write an essay about whether we really need a 'true' gender. ER -