earticle

영어

This paper examines how the contemporary discussions of posthumanism and gender migration are intertwined in Julia Ward Howe's recently recovered novel, The Hermaphrodite. Howe presents her intersexual protagonist, Laurence, as a perpetual migrant who not only travels across the geographical borders but within and across the boundaries of human body. Earlier in the text, the term “monster” is used to indicate the abnormality or anomaly of the individual who manifests the characteristics of both genders. However, the novel gradually reveals how the intersexual body of Laurence becomes a site of radical insubordinate and provocative potential as its very indeterminacy resists and confounds intelligibility, categorization, and social placement within the antebellum identity discourse. By presenting the intersexual body as the locus where the rigid boundaries between gender, sexuality and corporality become incessantly obscured, Howe interrogates the modern construction of the concept of “human” and explores her own resistance to and deviance from contemporary heteronormative and body-oriented definitions of humanity.