Sexual ambiguity: Narrative manifestations in adaptation

This thesis analyzes depictions of sexually ambiguous characters across intertextual sets of adaptive work; specifically, the ‘Satyrica’ of Roman statesman Gaius Petronius and Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, the ‘Orlandos’ of novelist Virginia Woolf and filmmaker Sally Potter, and Michel Foucault’s editorial incorporation of Camille Barbin’s memoirs into the elegant collection, ‘Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite’. Although medicolegal circles have long deployed their notions of sexual ambiguity to dubious ends, and while gender activists have rejected the term as technically insufficient, it seems premature to dismiss sexual ambiguity without further scrutiny. My task in this thesis is to examine tropes of sexual ambiguity as they are projected onto the characters in which they are said to occur, and, through the process of close reading, to evaluate what sexual ambiguity has to say for itself.