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.

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.