Is Anatomy Destiny?

In the video below Alice Dreger, author of a book-length consideration of intersexuality called The Medical Intervention of Sex (1998), shares intersex medical cases and how innovations in conceiving anatomy have resulted in greater political freedom from the rejection of hereditary rule at the country’s founding to the women’s and civil rights movements and beyond. 

Some noteworthy quotes:

“In fact, we now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn’t draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature.”

“Where I ran into the most heat from this most recently was last year the South African runner, Caster Semenya, had her sex called into question at the International Games in Berlin. I had a lot of journalists calling me, asking me, “Which is the test they’re going to run that will tell us whether or not Caster Semenya is male or female?” And I had to explain to the journalists there isn’t such a test.”

“So what we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes, the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories that we thought of as stable anatomical categories that mapped very simply to stable identity categories are a lot more fuzzy than we thought. And it’s not just in terms of sex. It’s also in terms of race, which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed.”

“So whereas the fathers were extremely attentive to figuring out how to protect individuals from the state, it’s possible that if we injected more mothers into this concept, what we would have is more of a concept of, not just how to protect, but how to care for each other.And maybe that’s where we need to go in the future, when we take democracy beyond anatomy, is to think less about the individual body, in terms of the identity, and think more about those relationships. So that as we the people try to create a more perfect union, we’re thinking about what we do for each other.”

Dreger is a professor in the Medical and Bioethics Program at Northwestern University. Other research has examined conjoined twins and dwarfs in medical history. Dreger also considers herself an activist for individuals with non-standard body types.

Encountering Intersex

When many people encounter intersexuality (the condition of individuals who are genetically and/or anatomically both male and female) for the first time, it’s often through the sensational headlines of journalists like the one above by ABC’s Ashley Jennings from just a few days ago.  Granted, these headlines do exactly what they’re supposed to in the age of online traffic quantified by page traffic and clickable ad revenue, but such stories, in some ways the gauge of public perception, frame intersex individuals as modern-day bearded ladies.

newsfixnow.com clip

 

The story offers a single perspective on a complex set of experiences (conflated with Hollywood drag of the early 90s comedies The Birdcage and Mrs. Doubtfire). While Steven/Stevie’s experience is by no means common, it is not entirely unique.  The Intersex Society of North America offers statistics on the frequency of an array of intersex conditions affecting people at frequencies ranging from 1 in 66 to 1 in over 100,000 with roughly 1,500 intersex babies being born in the United States each year.  Some, like Steven, go most or all of their lives without knowing about their intersexuality.  Others are operated on at an early age as doctors and parents respond to the so-called  “medical emergency” of abnormal genitalia (often resulting in losses of function and sensation).   Others go through life without surgery, but facing shame and secrecy associated with what the world around them might think about their embodied difference and liminality.

It’s no surprise why intersexuality isn’t often discussed as it simply doesn’t easily fit into the world views of many.  Returning to a previous metaphor briefly, the carnival barker headline may bring in the traffic, but the discussion that ensues in the comment section of these stories is to no one’s surprise the real circus as various sideshows of worldviews take shape.  Comments on this particular story range from the cruel, framing Steven/Stevie as the butt of a divine joke:

to the ignorant:

to the conspiratorially tangential:

Like any anonymous online forum, the standard crackpots rear their heads and make their jokes, but more thought-provoking comments prevail exposing some of the apparent complications in how we define gender in the 21st Century:

Naturally, questions arise such as what is the division between male and female?  Where does Stevie stand under the laws of her state and country? If this happens in nature, what is the theological explanation for intersex bodies created by an infallible God?  There are no simple answers.

Several works of fiction and non-fiction have grappled with these questions beyond the scope of snappy novelty headlines.  Scholars and organizations such as Alice Dreger and ISNA have made it their mission to explain intersexuality and advocate for the rights of intersex individuals.  Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2002 novel Middlesex features a Greek immigrant coming to terms with his intersex identity in San Francisco.  Intersex in Film is devoted to considering these questions by discussing filmic representations of intersex people alongside audience reception of intersex narratives including those of intersex individuals and advocates most familiar with the issues at hand.

Introducing Intersex in Film

On one level, Intersex in Film is just what it sounds like.  The site is a consideration of intersexuality (the condition of being between male and female in regards to sexual anatomy) in movies and television.  As this project unfolds, however, I see it as an exercise in test tube scholarship—an ongoing consideration of the intersex experience and body taking into account the work of scholars, the reception of film spectators and reviewers, and finally the perspectives of intersex individuals.  The broad goals of this project are to consider the depiction of intersex characters in film and their relationships to historical stereotypes.  As an online work, I hope to offer resources for mapping popular and academic discourse as well as offering a forum for scholars, film lovers, and intersex individuals to discuss these  representations.  The bottom line: how and why are intersex characters and experiences treated in film?

For more information visit IF’s About page.