Intervening in intersexualization: the clinic and the colony

Abstract

This dissertation intervenes into the process of intersexualization by focusing on specific moments in history in which anthropological, bio-medical and psychological accounts produce the issue of hermaphroditism/‘intersexuality’. Moreover, this dissertation examines underlying tropes, which merge in the power/knowledge complex that makes surgical intervention seem necessary in intersexualization. On the one hand, it shows how this process is immersed in binary categories like female/male, hetero- and homosexuality, normality/abnormality, civilized/savage, same/other. On the other hand, it depicts how these categories are reinstalled in the development and application of the category of ‘intersexuality’ in non-Western cultures. The central focus of this dissertation is the interrogation of the work of researchers from the United States namely John Money, Robert Stoller, Gilbert Herdt, Julian Davidson and Julianne Imperato-McGinley. Their contribution to the process of intersexualization is put into the context of their backgrounds, disciplinary training, collaborations, disagreements and referencing systems. I argue that it is not ‘intersexuality’ that is the phenomenon; rather the knowledge production and the treatment paradigm which resulted from the creation of ‘intersexuality’ as a medical category is the phenomenon. In the first section on The Clinic the focus is on John Money’s and Robert Stoller’s references to Freudian psychoanalysis in their attempts to define and determine categories such as gender, gender role, gender identity and sex and the treatment paradigm which followed from this. I argue that the gender-concept invented in the process of intersexualization essentializes what has been defined as sex and gender. Furthermore, I show how the corpus of work I am researching is firmly located in a patriarchal and heteronormative framework that sheds light on the wider societal and cultural organization of sex and gender. By mapping out the creation of subcategories such as gender role and gender identity I suggest that Money’s and Stoller’s research serves to essentialize a heterorelational sex-gender-sexuality-system on a biological as well as a psychological level. I argue that the notion of a ‘naturally’ bisex( ualiz)ed/gendered organization of human beings can only be uphold by the intersexualization of bodies and identities through surgical intervention. Furthermore, I will explore the work of feminist critical sex studies scholars, in particular Anne Fausto- Sterling’s proposal of the Five Sexes in regards to intersexualization. Critical feminist intervention into the essentialization of the body and sexual difference are also reviewed. In the second section on the Colony, I examine the cross-cultural process of intersexualization in anthropology. The researchers who are of central interest are Gilbert Herdt, Robert Stoller, Julian Davidson, and Julianne Imperato-McGinley. Their respective disciplines will be explored and put into their geo-political context. I analyze how the claim of a cross-cultural and universal ‘truth’ of ‘intersexuality’ derived from a cross-culturally expanded and exported desire to medicalize fostered the normalization of a binary organization of the sexes/genders through the construction of the ‘other’. I argue, that in the very subject of intersexualization tropes of civilization and the primitive, developed and naïve are in a neo-colonial manner combined with the categories of the Western sex-gender-sexuality system. Western systems of knowledge weave themselves into the interpretation of the ‘field’ and the referent of the West re-installs itself as the center and the Other as ‘lack’ always in relation to the West and its knowledge producers. Of special interest is the position of the researcher from the West who goes to other cultures and ‘looks’ and interprets, diagnoses and categorizes what s/he ‘sees’. The underlying features of this gaze are to be found in the pathologizing of not just the Other but also the sexuality of the other – the fifth other. This category has already widely been discussed in the analogies between sexualization and racialization/ethnicization but not yet adapted to the processes of intersexualization, which I undertake in this dissertation. Attention is also paid to the trope of the Third and its application in various contexts. This example is used to draw attention to the neo-colonizing features of anthropological categorization of sex-gender-sexuality-systems, yet it is also used to reflect on possibilities of resistance. I also give insight into the historical organization of knowledge production in the West by looking at the origins of discourses such as sexology and psychoanalysis, which still show reminiscences in anthropological research contributing to cross-cultural intersexualization. I conclude that the process of cross-cultural intersexualization is reflected in the distinction between sex and gender and the medicalizing Western gaze upon the other, which creates and normalizes the other according to the Western heterorelational system. I also ponder on a possible reconfiguration of history, knowledge production and the future in intersexualization.