To begin, I want to tell you a story of a medical emergency.
Zippora, a 41-year-old Israeli, has given birth to an intersexed child. Sociologist Meira Weiss happens to be in the delivery room; she is researching parental reactions to diseased and deformed babies. When the nurse shows Zippora her baby, Weiss reports that the new mother turns pale, trembles, and bursts into tears: “What will I do? What will I tell people on the street when they ask me what I had, a girl or a boy? What will I tell them? [crying]… Can you operate? Maybe you can do an operation or … several operations, and then everything will be O.K. … and then people will know whether it is a boy or a girl… Oh, how disgusting” (Morland 2001, 527).
I’ve told this story several times to open a discussion of intersex, and the reactions are always quite diverse. Some people ‘tsk’ audibly during conference presentations. Some people’s eyes widen, whether because they have never imagined this scene occurring, or because they are astonished at the vehemence of Zippora’s reaction, I’m not sure. But most people look vaguely uncomfortable, caught imagining themselves in Zippora’s situation, perhaps, feeling that even as the words she uttered at a moment of great distress sound harsh, unfair, too stark and cruel, that they could not guarantee that they themselves would not react in the same way, confronted with the body of a longed-for child, which has abruptly become something other than they had imagined. There is, perhaps, a kind of comfort in knowing that medicine will not downplay the distress and anxiety expressed at such a moment. Such a situation is treated as a medical emergency. Most NICUs (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) at most hospitals have a team ready to jump into action, to offer, supposedly, answers and solutions to the medical emergency of an infant with genitalia which doesn’t meet expectations.
Before I go on, I want to offer just a brief rundown of what intersex is, for those who have not encountered this phenomenon before. Intersex is the term that replaced ‘hermaphrodism’ in designating those bodies which did not fall neatly within those categories of ‘male’ bodies and ‘female’ bodies. The occurrence of intersex has been variously reported, but about 1.7 % of all live births seems to be the most accurate number so far. There are so many forms of intersex that sometimes talking about them collectively can be a bit misleading. There are some forms of genetic or chromosomal anomalies that will never manifest in variant genitalia or hormones at all, so that such people may never know that they are intersex in some sense. There are some which are the result of an insensitivity to a particular hormone, which can result in bodies which have testes and a vagina, because the ‘virilizing’ effect of that hormone never alters the body as it does in ‘males’. Or there can be micropenis, where the penis winds up shorter than expected in men. Or hypospadias, in which final part of the development of a ‘male’ feotus, the movement of the peehole from the base of the penis to the tip never quite completes. These are just a few examples of intersex, not an exhaustive list, but the majority result in what intersex advocates call ‘variant’ genitalia. As you can hear, every description I offer can only be fully understood in relation to those bodies taken as the measure of normalcy: male and female bodies. This is the standard from which intersex bodies are thought to vary. I’ll come back to this point. Some intersex advocates have recently adopted the term ‘DSD’ or ‘Disorders of Sexual Development’ as a better term than intersex (see www.isna.org). I resist this for a number of reasons, which I hope will become clear as the discussion progresses; but briefly: the adoption of medical language in this case works to reinforce that there is a proper order of sexual development, an order which intersex bodies fail to follow properly. This minimises the challenge that intersex poses to our assumptions about sexual dimorphism, as we shall see.
So, having discussed one form of authority over intersex bodies—that of medicine—I want to briefly mention another: the law. In NSW, there are criminal laws (Section 45 of the Crimes Act) which are designed to prevent “female genital mutilation”. They set down that any person who “excises, infibulates or otherwise mutilates the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person” should be imprisoned for 7 years. There are numerous recountings from intersexed people which use terms such as ‘excision’ and ‘mutilation’ to refer to the procedures performed upon their genitalia, and indeed, it is hard to see how the shortening of the clitoris, a fairly regular ‘treatment’ for intersexed infants, falls outside this part of the section. And indeed, some have suggested that cases should be brought against those who have performed ‘intersex corrective surgery’ under these laws. But the Act also contains an exception for those modifications deemed “necessary for the health of the person on whom it is performed.” And health is neatly described: “In determining whether an operation is necessary for the health of a person only matters relevant to the medical welfare of the person are to be taken into account.“ It’s pretty clear what’s at stake here: the Act is trying to outlaw one form of genital modification–that form known in the West as ‘female genital mutilation’, whilst ensuring that there are ways to argue in favour of others—and not only intersex, but ‘cosmetic’ genital procedures, which do not always differ significantly from those which are deemed ‘mutilation’. In order to ensure that this distinction is made and maintained, the law relies upon medical expertise as to what “medical welfare” actually means. A side note here is that this assumes that a special form of objectivity adheres to Western medical science’s understanding of healthy, normal genitalia, and so law relies upon Western medicine’s supposedly self-evident legitimacy to specifically preclude any non-Western ideas about what ‘normal’ genitalia look like. In other words, legitimising Western medical authority in this way ensures that genitalia which might be ‘normal’ in Kenya or Sudan can never be considered ‘healthy’.
So what does constitute ‘medical welfare’ in the context of intersex? Well, clearly the medical community agrees that there is something of a medical problem with intersexed bodies, or it would not have developed so many techniques for dealing with them. But while some of these techniques are designed to avoid serious medical problems, such as genital formations which divert urine back into the uterus, the majority of surgeries performed on infants with variant genitalia are designed to alter the appearance of that genitalia. Indeed, it has been argued that such surgeries aren’t for the health or medical welfare of the individual child, but is designed primarily to treat parental distress, as we saw in the case of Zippora. She cries out for someone to normalise her child’s genitalia, and in most if not all cases, this cry is answered, the suffering resolved. Through the surgical ‘normalisation’ of the child’s genitalia.
The ‘normalisation’ of the child’s genitalia is, in contemporary times, taken to be a resolution of the child’s ‘sex’. I want to draw attention now to the specificities of the assumption that genitalia which adheres to some sense of normal ‘male’ or ‘female’ genitalia is ‘healthy’ genitalia. We think we know what sex is—know it so well and easily that it doesn’t need specific description, or discussion is superfluous. But people have always felt this way, even in the eighteenth century, and our contemporary understanding of what constitutes a healthy sexed body is quite different from historical knowledges. Intersex advocate Alice Dreger draws attention to the specificity of our own take on sex by examining eighteenth century understandings, in which sex was considered to be given by the gonads. There’s a case of a woman who is having difficulty having sex due to a short vagina. She goes to the doctor who examines her, and upon discovery of an undescended testicle, exclaims ‘But, my good woman! You are a man!’. This woman was then expected to dissolve her marriage and begin living and working as a man. The economy of sex at this time was entirely given by the gonadal tissue they found: if you had testes, you were a man; if you had ovaries, you were a woman. Nothing else decided your sex (Dreger 2003, esp. the prologue).
Obviously, we have accounts of sex which, by comparison, are very sophisticated. If the eighteenth century was the age of the gonads, the twentieth and twenty-first might be considered the Age of the Genes, Chromosomes, Hormones, Gonadal Tissues, Primary and Secondary sex characteristics. Amongst other things. It might be tempting to say that we simply know more about what makes sex sex, now. But it’s not quite that simple. Knowing ‘more’ about what makes sex sex has changed what sex is: it has changed what counts as deeming someone of a particular sex. Sex was once defined by the presence of testicular tissue. No longer is this the case. Sex is now defined by an array of different aspects, any one of which could diverge from ‘normal’ sex. In other words, our knowledge of sex has changed, and as a result disciplines sex differently. A different economy of sexual difference—one premised on more than just testicular tissue—is now at work.
Yet for all that contemporary understandings of sex, even in popular discourse, are more complex than they once were, there’s another shift that has occurred in our economies of sex. What produces Zippora’s anxiety, her pallor, her trembling is, as Iain Morland observes, the visible unknowability of her child’s sex:
What kind of disgust does Zippora feel? She articulates an anxiety about language and knowledge: what will she tell people? How will they know her child’s sex? For Zippora, the relationship between telling and knowing has been fractured because she knows something about her child that she cannot tell: her new baby is intersexed. Its genitals are a mixture of male and female characteristics. The baby’s body has not differentiated as clearly male or female – for instance, it may appear to have both a clitoris and testes (Morland 2001, 527).
The ‘anatomical referents’ at work here, then, are more complicated than they were in the eighteenth century, and more clearly about appearance. In contemporary understandings of sex, there tends to be some familiarity with the complex scientific knowledge of sex, but the really defining part of sex is genitalia: a penis and testes makes a man, whilst a vagina and clitoris (the ovaries not being visible) make a woman. And this is evident in some of the ways that people articulate anxieties about variant genitalia: one of the most familiar is a fear of teasing or even bullying at school based on the appearance of a child’s genitals. The ‘locker room’ is regularly raised as a site in which visibility might produce problems, especially in American high schools (where cultures of nakedness would seem to differ substantially from my own experience in Australian schools). Yet as Alice Dreger points out, ‘Yes, what about the locker room? If so many people feel trepidation around it, why don’t we fix the locker room? There are ways to signal to children that they are not the problem, and normalization technologies are not the way.’ (Preeves 2003, 44)
And it is in reaction to these strict requirements of appearance that surgical intervention is made into the bodies of those who are intersexed. Lest we think that the insistence on a clear visual distinction between masculine and feminine genitalia is not properly legitimated, not properly “scientific,” I want to read a few different ways that doctors frame the decision to intervene in intersexed bodies, as collected by Susan Kessler:
Feelings about larger-than-typical clitorises are illustrated by these representative quotations:
The excision of a hypertrophied clitoris is to be preferred over allowing a disfiguring and embarrassing phallic structure to remain.
The anatomic derangements [were] surgically corrected… Surgical techniques… remedy the deformed external genitals… [E]ven patients who suffered from major clitoral overgrowth have responded well… [P]atients born with obtrusive clitoromegaly have been encountered. [N]ine females had persistent phallic enlargement that was embarrassing or offensive and incompatible with satisfactory presentation or adjustement. [After] surgery no prepubertal girl… described troublesome or painful erections.
Female babies born with an ungainly masculine enlargement of the clitoris evoke grave concern in the parents… [The new clitoroplasty technique] allow[s] erection without cosmetic offense.
Failure to [reduce the glans and shaft] will leave a button of unsightly tissue
[Another surgeon] has suggested… total elimination of the offending shaft of the clitoris.
[A particular surgical technique] can be included as part of the procedure when the size of the glans is challenging to a feminine cosmetic result. (Kessler 1998, 36)
Susan Kessler’s research demonstrates that most clitorises longer than .9 centimetres are considered ‘offensive’ in this way, and prompt surgical intervention of some kind, disciplining the body that might challenge the easy visual distinction between male and female bodies. And on the other side of the coin, infants whose ‘phallus’ contains a urethral opening (the urethral opening within the penis being apparently the defining difference between a penis and a clitoris) but which fall below about 2.5 centimetres are thought to have penises which are ‘too small’. Such children have often been ‘reassigned’ to being female, and given surgery to reflect this decision. The economies of visual difference between men and women, then, are quite specific, and the bodies of those who are intersexed are altered to adhere to such these economies. I’ll return to this point shortly.
But there’s a little more to the question of the economies of sexual difference in contemporary culture. We’ve seen already that they require the visual distinctiveness of male and female bodies to be maintained, even when that involves the reduction, excision and sometimes irreparable damage done to the bodies concerned. But this leads into another aspect of the requirements of sexual dimorphism: all bodies, it would seem, need to be made as capable as possible of heterosexual reproduction. Thus, fertility is often a consideration in whether to deem a body male or female, and the form of surgery performed. Further, hypospadic penises, that is, those penises in which the urethral opening occurs somewhere on the underside of the penis, and is sometimes not simply a ‘hole’, must be remedied, in order not only that boys be able to compete in pissing contests (yes, according to some doctors, this rite of passage is key to male identity development), but also to ensure that heterosexual reproductive sex is perfectly facilitated. In some cases, ‘repairing’ a hypospadic penis can take multiple surgeries, requiring long hospital visits throughout childhood. According to Robert Crouch, surgeries are shaped by the requirement that one have ‘a sufficiently large penis so that one can look like and “perform” as a male in childhood, and so that one can satisfy one’s partner later on even if that means having a scarred and desensitised penis’ (Crouch 1999, 34). The heterosexual functionality of the penis—its capacity to get hard and ejaculate ‘properly’ is more important, it would seem, than pleasure or any other considerations. Similarly, short vaginas are lengthened to ensure that the vagina offers a proper ‘sheath’ to the penis during heterosexual intercourse. In fact, according to some surgeons,
The clitoris is not essential for adequate sexual function and sexual gratification… but its preservation would seem to be desirable if achieved while maintaining satisfactory appearance and function… [So long as clitoral] presence does not interfere with cosmetic, psychological, social and sexual adjustment (Kessler 1998, 37).
Yet what, precisely is adequate sexual function? Intersex advocate Cheryl Chase (also known as ‘Bo Laurent’) describes a telling experience: when a doctor found that clitoral tissue had withered as a result of invasive surgeries, he said ‘you’ll find someone to hold you nice and you’ll be okay’ (Kessler 1998, 57). As Crouch observes, ‘looming in the background of all of this is a moralistic and gendered cultural script that views women as passive recipients during sex, simply there to please their partners, and not themselves agents of sexual desire or feeling’ (Crouch 1999, 33). Both these cases demonstrate how key heteronormativity—the presumed normalcy and naturalness of a particular kind of reproductive heterosexuality—is to contemporary economies of sex.
So now we have begun to unpick what, precisely, it is that constitutes the ‘medical welfare’ of the intersexed infant. Medicine participates in deeming particular kinds of bodies good and healthy, and others as problematic and unhealthy. It would be easy to say, and medical professionals sometimes offer this as a defence, that altering the body of an intersexed infant offers that child the chance to ‘grow up normal’. On the one hand, yes, maybe they do. Yet on the other, it cannot be denied that the stories of intersexed people are shaped by shame, stigma, the secrecy and the mysterious sense of something being wrong. Max Beck, once Judy before transitioning, describes having been told she was an ‘unfinished girl’, yet feeling like a ‘sexual Frankenstein’s monster,’ a sense that led her to have to deny her desire for other women and marry a man who was ‘non-plussed about [her] man-made parts’ (“My Life as an Intersexual”). But as well as the often devastating effects of surgery on intersexed infants, the normalisation of these bodies has another, significant effect on our economies of sex. Intersexed bodies are covered over, the challenge that they pose to traditional economies of sex are forcibly effaced. In disciplining these unruly bodies, we replicate and reiterate a narrow normative understanding of what sex can be. As Canguilhem observes, ‘[t]he normal is then at once the extension and the exhibition of the norm. It increases the rule at the same time that it points it out’ (Canguilhem 1991, 239). When our heteronormative visual economies of sex are such that bodies which challenge the limitations of those economies are altered to reiterate those limited economies, we effectively silence the corporeal challenge to our contemporary economies of sex, refusing to hear or negotiate with bodies, people and experiences which are different, unexpected, and which challenge our assumptions about the world.
In this respect, I want to suggest that it is not simply the lives of intersex people which are at stake, although it is certainly at the expense of intersex people’s happiness that these sexual economies are maintained. I mentioned, briefly, earlier, Max Beck. Max was raised as Judy, and his current partner, Tamara Alexander wrote about Max/Jude’s experiences in a piece called “Silence = Death”. Alexander recollects Max’s story of her college affair with a woman and the six words she said in bed that altered the entire course of Max’s life:
“Boy, Jude, you sure are weird.” Max told me she knew then that she was a lesbian but she could not be with women because they would know how her body was different. She married Harold because men were just less sensitive to the subtleties of women’s anatomy (Alexander 1999, 105).
This might seem insignificant, such a comment, but as surely as Zippora’s pallor, trembling and her tumble of distressed words and pleas, what is articulated is an inability to see beyond extremely limited economies of sex, an inability to perceive an intersexed person as anything other than weird or lacking, an inability to see anything but the failure to achieve the unambiguous genitalia of ‘normalcy’. There is little doubt that intersexed people are made to pay the majority of the cost for this need to discipline sex, in shame and secrecy and self-hatred and self-doubt, in bodies which they may never feel at home in; but it also shapes the limitations of experiences for non-intersexed people. Zippora misses the opportunity to welcome her child into the world with joy. Jude’s sexual partner misses the opportunity to experience Jude as Jude. But this is not an inevitability: Tamara Alexander gives us another way of encountering the intersexed other, describing their first sexual encounter:
She [Judy, as Max was then] was terrified, and I was aware of her fear and the cost of offering herself up to me in that moment… I have never wanted to pleasure someone, never wanted to offer my hands and fingers to heal and to love and to delight… I have never been so awed by the feeling of touching as I was that night. I wanted to stroke and explore and learn and know every inch of her, her large and proud clit, the lines and crevasses from scars and healing, the tight cavern of her cunt that held my fingers so tightly. She pulled me down on top of her and wrapped her arms around me and came, calling my name, sobbing against my shoulder. And I wept with her. I wept for the loss of what she hadn’t had and the lovers who hadn’t revelled in the wonder of her body, wept for what I hadn’t had before I held her in love, and I am weeping as I write this now (Alexander 1999, 106).
The response of Alexander to Jude is to Jude, not to Jude as she is described by categories, or her position in relation to normalcy (‘her’ “weird”ness). Alexander’s sense of wonder and delight in Jude’s body is not dependent upon the achievement or non-achievement of proper, unambiguous sex. Rather, she demonstrates that the imagination and openness that doctors and parents fear is too much to ask of the world is in fact possible; she opens up the possibility that what constitutes ‘medical welfare’ or ‘health’ might be better thought of as that which allows and encourages this kind of openness to those born intersexed, rather than deeming their bodies, from the very beginning, to be “emergencies” of ‘anatomic derangements’ in need of discipline.
What we can see here is that legal, medical and social regulation are bound up with each other, reinforcing not only authority, but also ensuring the reiteration of a singular economy of sex. This economy requires the disciplining of those bodies which fall outside its circumscription of legitimate categories: male and female. It deems worthless, or worse, threatening, those bodies which cannot be recognised as valuable according to its requirements. This economy not only disadvantages those who are different and thus cannot be recognised as valuable, but disadvantages all of us in ways that many of us have the privilege to not even be aware of. We forget—we have to forget—the gifts offered by those not recognized by existing economies of sex. Indeed, our forgetting occurs at their expense: in the disciplining wielding of the scalpel, in the requirement that traditional dichotomies of sex be maintained, in the supposed necessity that they understand themselves as disordered. And this is my response to those medical professionals who say that their techniques are ‘improving’ – what you mean by this is that your techniques are approximating heteronormative imaginaries better and better, replicating the very dichotomy that these bodies demonstrate the falsity and restrictiveness of. This is not to say that there are easy solutions, for there are not. And when those, like Zippora, are distressed, the impulse to help is important and ethical. But the response needs to take account of and negotiate with the diversity of bodies, rather than concealing the challenges that these various variant bodies pose to knowledge, to regulation, to discipline, and perhaps most intimately, most tellingly, to our very everyday lived experiences of sex.
References
Alexander, Tamara (1999) “Silence=Death” in Alice Dorumat Dreger (ed) Intersex in the Age of Ethics
Beck, Max “My Life as an Intersexual” accessed 2/5/09 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gender/beck.html
Canguilhem, Georges (1991) The normal and the pathological. C. Fawcett & R. Cohen (Trans.) Zone Books
Crouch, Robert (1999) ”Betwixst and Between: The Past and Future of Intersexuality” in Alice Dorumat Dreger (ed) Intersex in the Age of Ethics
Dreger, Alice Dorumat (2003) Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex Harvard University Press
Kessler, Suzanne (1998) Lessons From the Intersexed Rutgers University Press
Morland, Iain (2001) “Is Intersexuality Real?” Textual Practice 15(3) 527-547
Preeves, Sharon (2003) Intersex and Identity: The Contested Self Rutgers University Press
May 3, 2009 at 1:22 am
Thank you WP, that was fascinating and enlightening.
May 3, 2009 at 1:57 am
Thank you, mims!
May 3, 2009 at 7:26 am
Minor question – how does Australian culture-of-nakedness seem different? Is it just the usual ‘Americans are more obsessed with nudity than everyone else’?
May 3, 2009 at 9:47 am
Ok, more substantive comment:
I’m a bit surprised by your remark that “The response of Alexander to Jude is to Jude, not to Jude as she is described by categories, or her position in relation to normalcy.” I’m totally on board with acknowledging the experience of ‘responding to someone as herself, as she really is’–but is this really *opposed* to ‘responding to someone as she is described by categories,’ or even ‘her position in relation to normalcy’? It seems to me that we often desire most fiercely to be recognized *as authentically embodying* particular categories, identities, roles, what-have-you (butch/femme and BDSM roles come most easily to mind here, but I think it’s generalizable). And sometimes part of that identity is precisely its relation to normalcy (isn’t this part of what’s at issue for at least some of those who identify as ‘genderqueer’?)–someone who *just doesn’t notice* the abnormality is in these cases *failing* to respond to the person in the desired way. Is Alexander really *not responding* to Jude’s ‘relation to normalcy’ when she praises Jude’s “large and proud clit,” or is she instead pairing ‘proud’ with (the inherently comparative/relational) ‘large’ in order to explore a distinctly *positive* response to abnormality?
I don’t mean to suggest that you seem committed to any sort of questionable assumptions about authenticity or identity; not at all–really, that sentence is the only thing that comes close. And I realize I’m starting to do the whole “this is good, but why didn’t you write about something slightly different?” thing.
Ack, I have more thoughts but they’re really jumbled, so I’m just going to stop now. Really nice piece.
Oh! I was also curious about your use of the term ‘economy’ (e.g. ’singular economy of sex’). I take it that it’s an established usage in the relevant literature; what I’m wondering is what connotations, implicit inferential moves, citations, etc., it carries (as opposed to, e.g., discourse, conception, interpretation, hermeneutics, worldview, understanding, practice…).
But yeah. Thanks for posting this!
May 3, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Okay, bit by bit, yeah?
Cultures of nakedness differ quite substantially, as far as I can tell. The fact that everyone seems to freak out about the lockerroom in America implies to me that American kids spend more time with genitalia visible to each other than I ever did. My changing at school, like everyone else’s, was marked by an extreme awkwardness that arises when you try to keep a towel around you *and* get dressed at the same time. I’ve compared anecdotes with Scandinavians, and they spent much more time more easily naked around other people. Which of course was better for their self-esteem, in the end. But that’s a whole other post.
The use of ‘economy’ is because this is actually the same kind of argument I usually make referring to the memorialising and forgetting of gifts within an economy that will only recognise certain (normal) people as capable of generosity (those posts, I think, are under the ‘gift’ category). So usually I would be saying something like, Jude’s college girlfriend has to forget the gifts that Jude offers in order to maintain the existing economy of sex. Alexander, on the other hand, is marked by Jude’s gift, and this has the effect of allowing her to perceive Jude as she is, rather than as categories would see her.
Which leads into the really core bit of your comment, about categories. I’m a critic of identity politics, and this is precisely why. First of all, normalcy is defined binarily: normal vs abnormal. Abnormality is coded as the lack of normalcy, and is, according to the vast majority of legitimised discourses, a Very Bad Thing. Categories, and even ‘identities’, as they are perceived by others, then, are shaped by this context. A lot of the time when we perceive someone as of a particular identity, that’s not about recognition of who they are; it’s about assuming and even requiring that they adhere to our expectation of what that identity is. For example, most POC are unconvinced by white people’s understanding of who they are, as POC, because they’re not convinced (justifiably) that white people have any clue what they’re on about, so the category of identity that they are assuming never allows individual POCs to challenge that identity category. Similarly, I am a woman, but if someone treats me *as a woman*, rather than as *me*, I find that incredibly offensive, because they’re assuming to know who I am, instead of engaging with me, and allowing who I am to alter their understanding of that category. Trans people also complain (rightly) about ‘tranny-chasers’ doing precisely this. No one wants to be reduced to someone else’s conception of who they ought to be. It’s unethical. In other words, I actually think that a lot of supposed ‘recognition’ of identity categories is about failing to engage with the uniqueness of individuals, and their unique playing out of an identity category. And that’s in order to keep identity categories under *our* control: refusing to allow the world to show us anything that would challenge what we already think we know.
So when I say that Alexander responds to Jude as Jude, what I mean is not that Alexander denies Jude’s identity, on the contrary, but that she allows it to be whatever it is, rather than requiring that it adhere to some preconception of an identity. As far as “Is Alexander really *not responding* to Jude’s ‘relation to normalcy’ when she praises Jude’s “large and proud clit,” or is she instead pairing ‘proud’ with (the inherently comparative/relational) ‘large’ in order to explore a distinctly *positive* response to abnormality?” goes… well, yeah, kinda. But it’s not a response to *abnormality*, it’s a response to Jude. And *that* response functions as a challenge to those who assume that normalcy and abnormalcy shape the way that we *have* to approach the world.
Does that help at all?
May 4, 2009 at 4:22 am
Yes, that’s very helpful. I think I get the ‘economy’ idea now.
About categories: I think I agree with you about the traps of rigid categorization (and I think that politicizing identity categories contributes to this rigidity). That said, I’m going to be stubborn here: precisely because so much of (meaningful) communication is pragmatic/inferential rather than semantic/linguistically-conventional, our interpersonal interactions depend not merely on shared concepts but on shared concepts of identity (values, experiences, taken-for-granteds, desires, vulnerabilities).
A hasty qualification: ethical behavior means acknowledging one’s intitial perceptions as tentative and partial, and deferring significantly (though not absolutely) to the other’s self-understanding. And for some people, yes, sex really won’t be a significant part of their self-understanding, their project of self-improvisation–in which case it’s discourteous or worse to insist otherwise.
But the difference between the tranny-chaser and the femme-loving butch is only in the fetishization–the denial of subjectivity–and *not* in their (hypothetical) understanding of ‘trans’ or ‘femme’ as being social kinds, concepts we can play with and appropriate but which resist unilateral redefinition (and can carry meaning largely because of this).
I agree that normal/abnormal isn’t a useful typology–but we should acknowledge the *aspirational* nature of many identities/roles, including sex roles. And recognizing someone’s performance here means (implicitly) recognizing that they could have fallen short. So what does it mean, then, to ‘fall short’ in this way?
Maybe this is the crux of it: the most fucked-up thing about traditional identity categories, particularly sex/gender ones, is the refusal to accept *either* the rejection of particular identities in favor of others *or* that people can place quite disparate weighs on identity-performance. But we shouldn’t make the opposite error–’masculine,’ ‘man,’ even ‘male’ mustn’t be mandatory, but they can be meaningful and life-affirming, even if–in some sense, because–constraining.
Hope that made sense. If it helps, the examples I have in mind, the ones that make me a bit skeptical of the implications of your identity-critical posture, are, 1, the trans woman who acknowledges the potential validity of various ‘gender outlaw’ writings but, for herself, embraces and endorses a fairly traditional (or even religious) understanding of womanhood; 2, the morality of Jewish circumcision. (I’m sympathetic to both, but I wonder whether one can be while retaining a strong identity-critical disposition.)
May 4, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Okay, I’m not entirely sure I’ve followed all of this, but a few things: I’m essentially talking here about ethical responsibility. This is where the other is not able to be fully captured by our knowledge about them, where our response is to that which we cannot grasp. You might call the assumption that the other simply is who one thinks they are ‘fetishisation’, but I think it’s something other than this, because people do it all the time without fetishising the other’s identity, like in the other examples that I gave (race, in particular). And in the end, yes, I think the difference between the tranny-chaser and the femme-loving butch (although this latter is of course capable of unethical engagement too) is about how we engage with the other: do we require the other to adhere to our existing understanding of who we think they are, or do we allow them to be otherwise. That, in the end, *is* about what we think identity is. “Social kinds”, I think, is a bit too general to deal with the difference between ethical and unethical forms of engagement I’m talking about here. I guess my point is, if I use your language (which isn’t necessarily what I’d choose, for a few reasons) one’s ideas about how social kinds contribute to or shape subjectivity are relevant to how one engages with others; and how different to your expectations you allow/perceive them to be.
Being critical about identity and identity politics is not to say that I think that identity doesn’t affect people. It does, obviously. I’m not pretending otherwise. For many people, being able to call themselves ‘man’ or ‘male’ or whatever is obviously going to be important and life-affirming; but nothing I’m advocating here denies that. It simply points out that when we understand people solely or primarily via pre-existing categories, we miss their uniqueness, their otherness, their difference; and that uniqueness is probably going to be partly the ways that they interact with identity categories, because none of us ever performs them perfectly (normatively). I’m a little concerned, though, that my pointing out that Alexander’s reaction is to Jude, not Jude-as-defined-by-existing-categories-of-sex, seems to have been turned into a refusal to allow anyone to identity with categories, or to find existing identities affirming. Because that’s not it at all. I supposed my question in return would be: why does Alexander responding to Jude *as* Jude (and later as Max) preclude her response to Jude’s complex and unique engagement with identity categories? I would see Alexander’s response as precisely that: what it really means is that Alexander doesn’t reduce Jude to them and then find her wanting on that basis.
I’m not sure I grasp the ‘falling short’ thing. If one experiences the other as falling short, one has a standard to which one is attempting to hold them, against which they are being found lacking. Engaging with the other in this way is unethical: it suggests that the other ought not to be other to what I think they are, and codes all such otherness as a lack, a problem, a failure, rather than as part of the uniqueness that makes them them. As in, Jude’s college girlfriend, who can’t experience the astonishing gift of Jude’s body as a gift, but instead experiences it as a failure to achieve proper womanliness.
As for your two examples, I don’t understand how my strong identity-critical position would be unsympathetic to them? I’m not, so I really can’t work out why you would assume so. My only guess is that you think that any contextual production of subjectivity (in and through, say, a particular existing identity category) is rendered problematic. Not at all. But my point is that the trans woman inhabits femininity in a unique way (as do all women); those who engage with her only through the achievement or non-achievement of (their concept of) femininity are unethical, because they miss her uniqueness. As for the morality of Jewish circumcision… no body is ever untouched, no matter what its context, and every cultural context produces forms of embodiment unique to that context. In a Jewish context, circumcision is likely to be experienced as a significant part of one’s embodied heritage. For the record, though these things are complex, particularly given the globalisation of the West and the effect it has on specific contexts, I tend to feel the same about female circumcision.
How’re we doing now?
May 5, 2009 at 12:49 am
I think I understand better now – thanks!
May 4, 2009 at 11:19 am
You are such a terrific writer, WP, and I like this section of chapter a lot. I hope you’ll post more! And I would respond with more intelligent insights or get into the identity politics dicussion if I could, but I’m slaving away at the last three weeks of thesis before submission and eek — another three minutes gone.
May 4, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Thanks Az
It’s actually a paper I gave at UTS a lil while ago. I tried to make it accessible, and the responses I got seemed to suggest that they found it so, which is nice. And some people from a local Intersex advocacy group liked it, which was pretty heartening! Best of luck with the final stretch, my dear! I’m sending virtual completing vibes your way!!
May 5, 2009 at 11:59 am
Just a quick note to thank you for a truly insightful lecture. Few who are not Intersex demonstrate such a comprehensive knowledge of us in such a sympathetic way.
I have posted you paper on our site and a link to here.
Organisation Intersex International Australia endorses your Paper and encourages anyone who wants Insight into Intersex to read it.
Gina
oiiaustralia.com
May 5, 2009 at 2:59 pm
I had a conversation with a woman from AU, who was working in London at the time as a midwife, who related a similar story to the one you do above – this time to a group of (mostly) dykes in the park … Much of the way she related it made me bristle, at remarks of hers that suggested (in this instance) the Somalian background of the parents was the source of intolerance/confusion. No real mention of doctors, nurses, architectures of toilets and locker-rooms, and so on – as you’ve done.
But my question I guess is how understandings of race get folded in or removed in these discussions – insofar as they’re also about the familial, sex, proper lineage and authenticity.
May 5, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Mmm, it’s an interesting question. Questions of race come up in really intriguing ways in relation to intersex. First, I suspect that the kind of analysis that Meira Weiss did might be almost impossible in, say, the USA or Australia. I’ve read studies of how parents have adjusted to their intersexed child, but these are post-hoc reconstructions, which, while they are interesting, don’t capture that initial moment of confrontation in the same way. I’m surprised (or, you know, not so much surprised as grumpy) that a midwife would characterise the reaction as being the result of a Somalian background, though. I’ve also used the story of Zippora to point out that while it might be nice to vilify her, as an individual, to do that is a refusal of the responsibility we all hold for maintaining very limited conceptions of sex. But oh, we do like to make the other guilty and pat ourselves on the back, don’t we?
But as to race itself… Well, as I kind of gestured to in a teensy way in this paper, ‘normal’ genitalia, as the West conceives of it, is very racially specific. I’d quite like to do some more writing on this, because I think the intersection of intersex ‘corrective’ surgery and ‘FGM’ is very telling. Nikki Sullivan’s already done some work on this front (it’s in Social Semiotics 17:3, the edition I edited with Sam Murray). I recall Dr. Gary Warne, a Melbourne endocrinologist who forms part of a NICU ‘intersex’ team, coming to talk at my Uni. He was absolutely horrified that anyone would draw any comparison between intersex ‘corrective’ surgery and ‘FGM’. It was only when someone pointed out that what constitutes ‘normal’ genitalia is dependent on context, so that ‘uncircumcised’ genitals in certain parts of Africa would be deemed ‘abnormal’ that he kind of blinked, looked taken aback and said something like ‘Oh. Oh. I see what you mean.’ There are a few interesting cases, too, where hospitals in the US have ‘offered’ a particular form of genital surgery (usually less invasive than would otherwise occur) to immigrant communities as a kind of harm-reduction intervention into practices of ‘FGM’. There’s something interesting in these kinds of intersections, I think, particularly when, for example, some doctors have historically taken ‘the opportunity’ of performing surgery on a (Western) intersexed child to ‘fix’, say, the length of their vagina, even when she’s actually there for something else. And also in the suggestion that people use FGM legislation to challenge intersex surgeries… which I don’t think has ever been successful, but is an interesting approach, nonetheless.
For the most part, in the intersex literature I’ve cited, there’s very little awareness of race. Even, say, Dreger’s book really is about tracking how and why contemporary Western conceptions of sex came into being, and this is seen as unaffected by race. It’s problematic (but then, part of the reason I tend towards comparative work is because I’m intrigued by how laden individual categories are, and the extent to which they take their meaning by disavowing proximity to other categories). See, I actually think that, for example, the treatment of Haartman (‘The Hottentot Venus’), and especially the obsession with her genitalia after her death, demonstrates that race played a massive role in the production of the contemporary economy of sex. And of course, I can’t help noticing that the Age of the Gonads (okay, I’ll admit it, I’ll take almost any opportunity to use that phrase because it makes me smile) is around about the same time that the ‘moral science’ of statistics, and its partner, eugenics, were getting underway. The link between pathology and race under the eugenicist framework is one that’s long been pointed out; and I suspect that genital ‘deformity’, such as that of Haartman, would have played a significant role in the developing conceptions of normal genital morphologies and dimorphism. But that would require more research.
One final point about the way that race is currently affecting the intersex movement worldwide: ISNA, the Intersex Society of North America, has long been known as being at the forefront of intersex advocacy. They’ve recently shifted over to calling intersex ‘Disorders of Sexual Development’ and forming the ‘Accord Alliance’, which is no longer anti-surgery, as a technique for distancing themselves from ISNA, which is perceived as ‘anti-medicine’. So the Accord Alliance is an alliance with doctors. Very pragmatic, I’m sure; shame they’re selling themselves out. But at the same time, OII, or the Organisation Intersex International was started in Quebec, and is currently the largest Intersex organisation in the world, though they’re quite new, and still have big gaps in their membership (south-east Asia being a biggie). They’re anti-DSD, and anti-surgery, and tend to take the view that our contemporary conceptions of sex are the site of the problem, not intersex. But a whole lot of people don’t know anything at all about them, because ISNA dominates. This is particularly worrying given ISNA’s turn to the Accord Alliance, and the tendency for American medical practice to be so swiftly globalised… But a major problem is that yes, once again, white Westerners dominate the international advocacy scene for this particular issue…
[sigh] I do go on. I hope something in there answers your question, even a little…
May 6, 2009 at 7:41 am
I just heard today that the German const. Court rejected a challenge to the ban on 3+ hypenated last names; reading about it I was struck by the apparent fact that Germany require first names to be gender ‘appropriate’. Do you happen to know if this has been challenged by intersex folks at all, by any chance?
*envying Australian weather*
May 6, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I have no idea, sorry, X. Trapnel. Do you think it’s law? Because most Western nations ‘require’ first names to be gender appropriate; it’s just regulated by social custom rather than law.
May 7, 2009 at 12:20 am
Yeah, it’s law (site); Germany is apparently unusually restrictive in its laws on this. Upon digging a tiny bit more: you can give multiple ‘first names’, but at least one must be gender ‘appropriate’ and the others gender neutral (except for ‘Maria’ which is allowed for boys too; a Catholic thing). Anyway, the existence of neutral names suggests a sort of answer to my question…
May 6, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Congrat’s on a great piece.
I’m saddened at what I interpret as attempts by some comments/posts to absorb IS into identity politics. No matter what identities an IS individual adopts, the site of the initial contest is anatomical sex. Not gender or sexual orientation!
This contest is conducted in the context of whatever social and cultural meanings are attached to IS anatomies.
Attempts to impose ‘gender’ in the form of identity and role, merely purport to exert a Pavlovian-like control over embodiments that are perceived as marginal or unacceptable.
Surgeries to control anatomies, Pavlovian conditioning to control the way sexuality and gender role are expressed = normalizing the unacceptable.
When seen in this light, identity politics are used to control and manage Intersex, not listen to, or comprehend it.
Just my personal view.
Joanne.
May 10, 2009 at 1:02 am
This is often the risk of identity politics, Joanne. It certainly has its uses, but it has its problems and risks too, as you say, often in the tendency to homogenise heterogeneous groups. Thanks for stopping by and for your kind words!
May 9, 2009 at 10:55 pm
[...] May, 2009 in Feminism | Tags: identity, quotable feminists Wildly Parenthetical recently posted Disciplining Sex: Economies Etched in Intersexed Flesh. It’s an excellent piece of writing, but I want to quote something WP said in [...]
May 18, 2009 at 11:27 pm
I don’t recall seeing it in the post – but there’s actual controversy over the DSD tag, which has caused some bad blood, and many intersex activists consider Dreger dangerous to them as a consequence.
One example.
May 19, 2009 at 12:00 am
Hi Lisa; nice to see you around here again! One of the things I miss about being an active blogger!
Yes, Dreger shifted her perspective quite dramatically, along with others from ISNA, allegedly in an attempt to get around the hostility of medical professionals to the intersex movement (I’ve heard of other theories too about why, precisely, Dreger made the shift she did). They developed the Accord Alliance, which adopted the language of DSD, and no longer advocates against intersex ‘corrective’ surgery. She’s done a few other extremely dodgy things as well. This is a bit of a sore point amongst intersex activists, primarily, I think, because her work for a long while resisted the kinds of perspectives held by the Accord Alliance (especially about DSD and ‘corrective’ surgeries). I didn’t really want to get into that tangle for the above paper, which was a presentation to a fairly general audience. But yes, it’s a definite problem, and it doesn’t surprise me that intersex activists see Dreger as dangerous.
May 19, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Well, it probably would be fair to at least mention that Dreger’s methods really are unpopular with intersex (and trans, for that matter) activists.
I like seeing stuff that interrogates the notion of objective biological sex, though. That’s a bit unusual, and people are still quick to dodge the notion that the point of “biological sex” is to gender the body.
May 26, 2009 at 10:35 am
[...] Disciplining Sex: Economies Etched in Intersexed Flesh by Jessica Cadwallader, PhD: Some intersex advocates have recently adopted the term ‘DSD’ or [...]
June 1, 2009 at 6:22 am
[...] Disciplining Sex Disciplining Sex: Economies Etched in Intersexed Flesh [...]
June 3, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Finally found time to read this with some concentration.
Clarifies things that had floated in my head from anecdotes, but I’d never thought through in detail.
I do have a query though, regarding fertility. I realise that fertility isn’t, and should not be, an overriding concern. But plenty of people would like to be fertile when they aren’t. Is it valid to try to intervene to make fertility possible? And if so, under what circumstances? Perhaps these are more musings than queries.
We were, very briefly, looking at having an infertile child (false positive diagnosis), and my immediate thought was what could be done to offer him options for having children. But that was ethically easy to deal with, anything I was considering would happen at puberty at the earliest, probably older. It would be his choice, I just wanted to know what the possibilities were.
I can understand the position of fertility being hetero-normative, but I also see it as a potential, which I think most people would rather have than not have. Having said that, I’m not sure how many people would choose that potential at the expense of damaging surgery.
Now I’m wondering what my point is… I guess I can’t put myself in the IS position well enough to understand what the role and importance of fertility is for IS people.
July 11, 2009 at 9:51 pm
[...] a very good post on intersexed bodies and the medical system, see here. [...]
May 19, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Sorry, Lisa, I don’t think I was properly clear. As far as I know, the work of Dreger’s that I have cited is, in general, not the stuff of hers that intersex activists have major problems with. Indeed, it’s part of what makes possible the really important critical engagement with the ‘biological body’ which is still, for the most part, not problematised in mainstream discourse. Her later work on DSD, which, from what I understand, is what most activists have problems with (and me too, as I mentioned above), actually reinforces an unproblematic and uninterrogated understanding of biological sex (as ‘ordered’), and as such demonstrates quite a shift from her earlier perspectives I cited (and one which I interrogated, if briefly and without reference to her work, in the paper above). I’m happy to discuss problems with Dreger’s work, obviously, and I guess I could add a footnote to document the shift, but I’m not sure why pointing out that intersex activists have problems with Dreger for work I didn’t include in the paper itself is necessary, especially given that I use a lot more people than just her and certainly don’t express any uncritical approval of her? I feel like I’m missing something here, so I apologise if I’m blind-spotting!
May 19, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Okay, first I am totally not attacking your paper. I loved reading it right at this point because of some recent conversations I’ve been in.
I think it’s slightly problematic to mention Dr. Dreger, to mention her shift when supporting the DSD terminology, mention your own criticism of DSD, and not also mention that this actually caused a schism among intersex activists, contributed to the formation of OII, and how many intersex activists are opposed to the DSD terminology themselves.
It wasn’t anything about expressing uncritical approval of her or her methods or anything like that.
I hope that made sense.
May 19, 2009 at 9:16 pm
No, no, I didn’t think you were attacking it. I’ve seen enough of your work around the place to know we share the critique of the biological grounding of sex. I was just trying to work out if I could see the problem you thought I should address. I get anxious when I think there’s not a problem, because it makes me feel like I’m missing something key…
And I kinda can see your point. If I’d been outlining the whole DSD crapola more, I definitely would have done as you suggest (i.e., sketch a bit more of the activism side of things around the shift to ‘DSD’). I mentioned it very very briefly, mostly because I didn’t want to ignore such a big issue, and because I knew that some people in the audience would know about it, but *only* briefly because I knew some people would still be thinking ‘wha? inter-wha?’ My focus was on making the argument about disciplines of sex, and if I’d had more time (I was way over as it was), I’d have talked about how DSD is used to, precisely, continue the disciplining of sex and sexed bodies… actually, this makes me kind of tempted to expand the paper to do precisely that. This paper hadn’t felt very original to me – and very little of it *my* work, as opposed to a collation of the work of others, which isn’t entirely surprising when it’s a paper about an area some know nothing about – but adding in a consideration of Dreger’s self-contradiction around the shift to DSD, and the way that the terminology itself attempts to perpetuate the narrow disciplining of sex, and the resistance of some pretty savvy activists to it would make it much more interesting… and a bit better balanced between the academic and the activist…
Thanks for your thoughts, Lisa…