15:30
Gresham College
November 10
This lecture focuses on the intense posthumous speculation about the reputedly female body of the high-raking nineteenth-century military surgeon James Barry (1789?-1865). The instabilities in the factual Barry’s self-construction and the sensational disclosures after his death underpin Victorian, twentieth century and contemporary representations of the re-imagined Barry’s slippery gender/sex identities.How has this inflected pronoun choice and visual depiction? Does the way Barry has been represented shift across time, so that he serves as both a boundary crosser and a boundary marker of gender/sex paradigms?