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US-American philosopher Norman O. Brown (1913–2002) was one of the very few twentieth-century intellectuals to situate hermaphroditism at the core of their work. Although Brown's publications became cult books of the then emerging protest subcultures and were eventually regarded as milestones in the history of Freudian revisionism, the reception of his views on hermaphroditism has been insubstantial. The present contribution focuses at first on Brown's attempt to supersede binary sexuality and its same-sex/other-sex combinatories by positing an ambit of hermaphroditic reconciliation that emerges from the depths of the unconscious, but is effectual only as an eschatological ideal. Against this backdrop, Brown's consequential neglect of Charles Darwin's universalization of corporeal hermaphroditism and of Magnus Hirschfeld's conception of human sexual intermediariness are analyzed and assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) conjoined issues of sexuality and race in works that foreground the aesthetic worth of Black bodies. While exposing Western figuration practices that exclude Black people from artistic visibility, Barthé also targeted the African American distaste for the explicit treatment of nudity. Barthé's androgynous sculptures have by now become the trademark of his art, but Barthésian scholarship still neglects the significance of a small group of statues, which de-emphasize the aura of same-sex desire, in order to explore the intricacies of corporeal ambisexuality. In view of his homoerotic depictions and the presence of the hermaphrodite at the core of his disruption of the sexual dichotomy, the frequent assumption that Barthé remained "closeted all his life" does not stand critical scrutiny. Instead of taking refuge in the sexual closet, Barthé debunked the man/woman binary as the foremost epistemic construct that prompts the societal need for sexual self-misrepresentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two prominent representatives of the sexual emancipation movement in Germany, John Henry Mackay (1864-1933) and Magnus Hirschfield (1868-1935) launched significant attacks on sexual binarism and its combinatories. Although Mackay defended the "nameless love" against seminal Christian and subsequent secularised misconstructions of its nature, he was unable to overcome the fundamental scheme of binomic sexuality. Hirschfield, however, resolved the theoretical issue through his "doctrine of sexual intermediaries" (Zwischenstufenlehre) which purports that--without exception--all human being are intersexual variants, i.e., unique composites of different proportions of masculinity and femininity. Since these proportions vary from one sexual layer of description to another in the same individual and can alter or be altered in time, it is sensu stricto not possible to postulate discrete sexual categories. Hirschfield's "doctrine" implies a radical deconstruction of not only binomic sexuality but its supplementation through a "third sex." It offers a meta-theoretical framework for rethinking sexual difference beyond the fictional schemes and categorical closures of Western traditions of sexual identity. His assumption of potentially infinite sexualities anticipates some of the basic tenets forwarded by the philosophical and political agendas of queer studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]