Before sexology and medical science prevailed in Japan as the accepted forms of "knowledge" of human sexuality, by the 1910s and '20s, other discourses competed with sexology's binaries of "normal sex" and "pathological sex," and so on. Leslie Winston will discuss the paradigm of intersexuality in the work of Shimizu Shikin (1868-1933) and Tokuda Shûsei (1872-1943) as a counter-discourse to the dominant narratives on sexuality. The body of the hermaphrodite confirmed that the roles the state insisted women should assume, in fact had no basis in "nature." As sexologists and scientists were making efforts to eliminate hermaphroditism, Shikin and Shûsei were invigorating it as an alternate discourse.

Leslie Winston is Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at Dickinson College. Her research focuses on subjectivity, particularly the female subject, in Japanese literature of the 1890s and early twentieth century. Her current interest lies in the discourse on intersexuality and its production of knowledge of the categories of "woman" and "man." She earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.A. in English Literature from Stony Brook University, and an M.A. in Communication Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.