Sexual intermediacy and temporality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century literature and culture
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Date
30/06/2010Author
Funke, Jana
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Abstract
It is often acknowledged that the sexually intermediate body destabilises sexual
dimorphisms, but, so far, little attention has been paid to the way sexual intermediacy
relates to normative figurations of time. Focusing mainly on literary and cultural
discourses from late Romanticism to Modernism, the thesis examines how
constructions of sexual intermediacy have contributed and responded to shifting
concerns with temporality. It also investigates the relationship between literature and
science through a comparative engagement with evolutionary, psychoanalytic and
sexological discourses. The individual chapters deal with the conflicted temporality
of the substantiated androgyne; the haunted and uncanny materiality of the
hermaphroditic body in late nineteenth-century science and literature; sexual
intermediacy and the prescriptive linear narrative of the case history; the sexual,
temporal and national crises of World War I; and sexual travels in time and space.
Overall, the thesis illustrates that sex and time are intimately related and shows that
the changing understanding of sexual intermediacy opens up a powerful critique of
sexual and temporal structures.