Sex variation and gender: Language and the biopolitics of intersex

Abstract

In the biopolitics of sex in all its variation (a multiply complex diversity that gets socio-culturally reduced to male, female and intersex), the role of gender has been controversial. Some have argued that gender is no more or less relevant to intersex-bodied people than it is to anyone else, and an undue focus on it is mainly a distraction from the central dilemma of intersex-bodied people. That is, the dilemma of having had intersex genital surgery in childhood; it tends to result in a conundrum concerning how to describe one’s desires and identifications in the first place (a very different dilemma from that of transgender people, for instance). However, the very concept of socially-constructed gender, and the separation of sex and gender that is so central to feminist theorizing, has a genealogical lineage directly to intersex bodies and their anatomical regulation. This talk will explore the implications of all of these factors in the biopolitics of sex variation.