James Baldwin Essay Prize

Audrey Martel-Dion is a History Ph.D. student in the Early Modern Europe field, focusing on gender, sex, and sexuality in legal, medical, and literary works from the 16th to the 18th century.  Her particular interest is in the queer and trans possibilities of the past. Before joining Stanford, Audrey completed an MA in History at the Université de Montréal with a thesis examining discourses on female homoeroticism and trans masculinity in Italy through the life of Giovanni Bordoni (1716-1743). Her research investigates competing discourses on female same-sex desires in Italy, various motifs and cases of intersexuality (or early modern hermaphroditism) in France as well as tools and practices of “gender transing” across Europe.  Audrey’s paper examines the trope of the hermaphroditic society in French thought and how it was displaced as exploration, cartography, and cosmography evolved from the mid-16th century to the end of the 18th century. As she shows, the hermaphrodite was consistently associated with the margins of the known world (even as these changed and expanded) but gradually also with the limits of human beings as a species.