The Invention of the Neuter

Diogenes 52 (4):61-72 (2005)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

From the Symbolist period to the inter-war years, and in works ever more numerous as time went by, literature and medicine, both together and separately, constructed a discourse progressively focused on the enigma of the ‘third sex’. But how perceived? As an aberration, a mere legend, a mirage, a mental defect, a mistake of nature? The ‘third sex’ came to designate the sex of the indistinct, that which has no name, drawing within its sphere the primordial Adam, the angel, the ephebe, the androgyne, the hermaphrodite, the transvestite, the effeminate male, the mannish woman, the pederast, the sodomite, the tribade, the Sapphist, the transsexual, the degenerate. Around 1900, to this unsettling tribe was even added the working woman who, as a result, was thought to have ‘abandoned her true condition’, and who thus had become ‘desexualized’ or ‘asexual’. In his preface to Willy's treatise on the Third Sex (1927), describing the Paris of Sodom and Gomorrah, Louis Estève drew attention to the part played by a now totally forgotten novel of the same name, The Third Sex by Ernst Ludwig von Wolzogen (1902), in the creation, handing down and popularization of this term. But contrary to what this title might suggest, Wolzogen does not focus on homosexuals in his book, but rather on those independent women, without husbands but with jobs, whom he refers to as ‘the neuters’. Neutrality conceived of as the effacement of the masculine and the feminine, perhaps as an effect of modern life? The theme has now come full circle in the corpus of reflection on the third sex, though it seems to have been applied more specifically to emancipated women, and singularly to lesbians.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Invention of the Neuter.Laure Murat - 2005 - Diogenes 52 (4):61-72.
Notes on the Emphatic Neuter.John Greene - 1904 - The Classical Review 18 (09):448-450.
The secret and the neuter: On Heidegger and Blanchot.Pascal Massie - 2007 - Research in Phenomenology 37 (1):32-55.
On Einstein's Invention of Special Relativity.Arthur I. Miller - 1982 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1982:377 - 402.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-10-28

Downloads
17 (#742,076)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references