"Man or woman. Is there a viable space between or outside these two categories?" asks Laure Murat at the beginning of The Law of Gender. The answer is yes: there is another category, at once literary, medical and police, that of the "third sex". Starting from the famous definition of the German jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (the "third sex" is "a woman's soul in a man's body" and vice versa), the historian considers that the "third sex" is in fact a third gender, i.e. a political, social and cultural construction as opposed to anatomical sex. She therefore apprehends this "third sex" as "a fact of language, ordering a series of theories and discourses around figures supposed to embody them between 1835 and 1939, mainly in France, but also in Germany and England".
"The book's references are numerous and precise, the illustrations on the central pages bring the analyses to life, the problems raised are new or at least revisited from a new angle (inversion, the "virile" woman, the "feminine" man, transsexualism). Finally, the feather is beautiful. Laure Murat, for example, offers us a fine typology of those who are called "aunts" in police archives: the "persilleuses" solicit the "shameful"; the "workers" are effeminate-looking workers; The "rivettes", from all social strata, are more difficult to identify. Considered as passive men who "play the woman", the "aunts", by provoking sexual disorder, prefigure political disorder and are therefore hunted down by the police. On the other hand, lesbians, who were called "tribads" until the end of the nineteenth century, remained absent from police records.
They can be seen in novels (Gautier, Sand, Balzac, Rachilde, Colette) where they disguise themselves as men, play the role of men, seduce men and women, provoking scandals and dramas. It is not for nothing that emancipated women who practice cycling or work in men's professions, thus occupying the public space, are also considered strange beings, no longer quite women, but not quite men either. They are sometimes confused with lesbians within the "third sex" because they change the relationship between the sexes, the cohesion of the family and the balance of society. Far from forming a homogeneous group, the "third sex" transcends classes and mixes genders."
Available via idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk
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