"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".
