2025 Theses Doctoral

Sex and the Soul: Science, Religion, and Non-binary Gender in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Hermanson, Kit

Many scholars have explored how nineteenth-century physicians and scientists eradicated the category of “hermaphroditism” from modern medical practice, but fewer have asked why. This dissertation posits that the erasure of non-binary sex and establishment of binary sex in the nineteenth-century United States was a result of a widespread and deeply held belief in the infallibility of sex as interpreted by Protestants from Genesis 1:27 that was invisibilized by the metaphysical claims of Protestant-secular normativity.

These newly invented truths of binary sex reciprocally affected how nineteenth-century Americans imagined and practiced the body, the soul, and divinity itself. The nineteenth-century non-binary appeared in the bigender Gods of the Shakers, Oneida Community, and Thomas Lake Harris; the genderless spirit of the Public Universal Friend; the imagined eunuch and vanishing hermaphrodite; and the unsexed soul of the Transcendentalists and Julia Ward Howe.

This dissertation argues that the cultural mechanisms that foreclosed the viability of sexual ambiguity conversely provided metaphysical conditions for imagining the sexed self that defied biopolitical norms. Over the century, I argue, the discursive frictions between religion, science, secularism, spirituality, and sex caused the emergence of ways of thinking about the self’s relationship to the sexed body that anticipated and, perhaps, made possible many of our present debates on sex, gender, and sexuality. In sum, I posit that the non-binary—the haunting space between male and female—is an American tradition.