Reading Contemporary Intersex Stories by Katelyn Dykstra a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate St

Narrating the Slash: Reading Contemporary Intersex Stories By Katelyn Dykstra A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Manitoba in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media The University of Manitoba Winnipeg Copyright Ó 2018 by Katelyn Dykstra Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….i Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………...ii Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………….iii Introduction: “The Trouble”……………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: “‘Someone Else’s Story’: Situating Intersex Fictions”……………………….....26 Chapter Two: “After the Touch of Loss: Intersex, Objects, and Life-Narrative”……………...90 Chapter Three: “‘We Have Enough Endangered Species Around Here’: Intersex in our Age of Toxicity”………………………………………………………………………………………..138 Coda: “On Reaching”…………………………………………………………………………..192 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………203 Acknowledgements The first thank you is to the writers, artists, and theorists this project speaks with, particularly those that have been subject to harm because their bodies don’t fit the impossible script of ideal maleness or femaleness. I sincerely hope my work has done justice to your stories. I also ardently thank my partner Jeff, and our two children Ronin and Strider – the three pillars of my universe. Without you, life would be horribly dull and dangerously lonely. My parents, Pam and Jeff Dykstra, deserve more thanks than there is space or words to write for their immense support, in every way. Dr. Matt Sheedy: I don’t know how anyone does a PhD (or life, for that matter) without someone like you – passionate thinker and perpetual jokester. Thank you will never be enough. Thank you to all the friends and family who provided child-care, food, good conversation, and love during this process. Special thanks to Cayla Gilbert, whose love is infinite; to Nathan Thompson, who read and laughed with me; to Karalyn Dokurno, without whom I would certainly have drown in the muck; to Jennifer Black, fabulous femme superhero; and to Ashley Clark, whose friendship is a gift to everyone lucky enough to have it. An outpouring of gratitude for my committee: my advisor, Dr. Hee-Jung Serenity Joo, Dr. Dana Medoro, Dr. Jocelyn Thorpe, and Dr. Dina Georgis. Your expansive hearts and minds encouraged this project to be more than I could have imagined. You have each modeled for me a better world. Thank you, too, to Dr. Lisa DeTora and Dr. Stephanie Hilger for your guidance. Thank you to the staff, faculty, and students at the University of Manitoba and The University of Prince Edward Island who have taken chances on me. The financial support Duff Roblin Fellowship, UMGF, and the Arts Endowment Fund, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council made this project possible. It has been a pleasure beyond words. i Dedication To all the creatures, great and small, that dare to fiercely love what is strange in themselves and in others. ii Abstract Intersex is a diagnosis of atypical sex reclaimed as an identity marker for bodies so diagnosed. Intersex is located in the genitals, chromosomes, gonads, hormones, or secondary-sex characteristics of the person named as such. Intersex throws into sharp relief the biopolitical imperative to discipline human and many non-human bodies into uncomplicated categories of male and female. The artistic production about, by, and for intersex people has been understudied. This dissertation enters into the emerging field of intersex studies by providing an imaginative and interdisciplinary response to literary fiction about, life-narratives by, and experimental poetics and film for and about, intersex people. Chapter One examines the erasure of race in Kathleen Winter’s 2010 novel about the coming of age of an intersex teen entitled Annabel. Building on critiques of Jeffrey Eugenides’s oft-studied Middlesex, I apply existing scholarship on the eclipsing of race by attempts to incorporate a mythical and metaphorical intersex body into the space of the nation to Winter’s text. Chapter Two turns from fictionalized intersex experiences to life-narratives written by intersex people. In this chapter, I centre the object of the scalpel and the medical chart in the life-narratives I study – Thea Hillman’s Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) and short pieces from the 2015 issue of The Journal of Narrative Bioethics – in order to trace the affective narrative strategies the authors deploy in an effort to end the biomedicalization of the intersex body. Chapter Three pivots towards the non-human animal intersex body, and their use in public panics about the increasing environmental toxicity of our world. In an effort to counter this “transsex panic,” I read Aaron Apps’s 2015 book of poetry Intersex: A Memoir and Lucía Puenzo’s 2007 film XXY as examples of texts that see sex not as a static or “natural” category, but as a process. The brief Coda that concludes this iii dissertation expands on the notion of sex as a process to engage in an experimental discussion of genitalia. The Coda argues for an understanding of genital variation instead of perfection. iv Introduction: The Trouble The anatomical model for sex is an ideal, and thus, by definition, something impossible for any individual body to possess or perform. Morgan Holmes, “Mind the Gaps” 172. We like to think of male and female as uncomplicated categories. Men have penises, testicles, and produce sperm. Women have clitorises, vaginas, wombs, and produce ovum. These sperm and ovum come together to create new life in the process of human reproductive sex. It’s a fairly simple story…until, it isn’t. At birth, the external organs that indicate our reproductive capacity are given a cursory glance by physicians, nurses, or midwives. That glance and subsequent speech act – “it’s a boy!”/ “it’s a girl!” – determines how we will be interacted with for the rest of our lives. Even if we change our genders later in life, this first moment of designation as male or female marks us irrevocably. But, should a body need more than just a cursory look, should a body require chromosomal testing to determine their sex because their penis or their clitoris looks like something “in-between,” that body begins to make trouble. “Intersex is trouble” sociologist and intersex activist Morgan Holmes writes: It is trouble for the families of children so diagnosed; it is trouble for the medical specialists who make careers out of neutralizing “abnormality”; it is trouble to a system of sex/gender that insists that bodies are oppositional in/by “nature” limited by an absolute dimorphism. Most of all, however, intersex is trouble for those whose bodies are so labeled, but not because of any inherent “difficulty” in the biological and/or anatomical manifestation(s) of intersexuality. The trouble with intersex is […] decidedly social, but the burden of cost for the trouble to the social system is borne primarily by intersex infants and children.” (Intersex 13) 1 If we consider the scenario I have outlined above, we can begin to see why Holmes understands intersex as trouble, particularly for intersex infants and children. “Intersex” indicates bodies that do not fit neatly into the “absolute dimorphism” of our social and cultural system of designating sex. This dissertation uses literary and cultural criticism to highlight and seriously engage with texts written by and about intersex people. I approach fiction, non-fiction, fictional film, and poetics to follow the narrative lines that these texts leave in an effort to highlight the dimorphism that intersex bodies challenge. I take a decidedly intersectional approach, attending to issues of race, class, gender, and sexualities that affect the way intersex bodies and experiences are narrated and read. I follow these narrative threads into some unexpected places: the barren snow-covered landscape of Labrador; the inside of an narrator’s car, where they sit with a stolen copy of their own medical chart; the inside of a narrator’s mouth, where an alligator egg sits and gestates; and the eye of a turtle. It becomes clear that even under the pressure of social erasure, intersex emerges unexpectedly, to challenge one of the most firmly held beliefs in Western culture: that binary sexes are stable categories. Stable binary sexes categories are the products of the biopolitical disciplining of the body which aims to erase the intersex body by forcing it into fallacious binary categories. Biopolitics is an indispensable term in the sphere of biomedicine and ethics, and therefore provides a valuable mode of thinking through the disciplining of intersex bodies in this dissertation. However, as Thomas Lemke clearly points out in his book Bio-politics: An Advanced Introduction, biopolitics has taken on diverse and fluxuating meanings (2). When I use it, I intend to evoke the process of promoting life at the level of populations. Biopolitics works at the level of the statistical group, tracking, tracing, and measuring just what kind of a life is being had in order to make possible a more productive life. By requiring statistically measurable groups, 2 biopolitics encourages the conditions through which sexuality gets constructed as such in order to make measurable categories – gay, straight, normal, perverted, and so on. These categories enforce a male/female binary in order to carefully secure and police the boundaries of “straight,” “gay,” “normal,” and “perverted,” amongst others, which are then ranked according to their ability to thrive. Those that do not encourage the thriving of life are, through technologies of social exclusion, marginalized. Intersex, then, gets managed into gender and sex categories through violent biomedicalization in order to secure intersex bodies as worth having a life. According to Adele Clarke et. al, biomedicalization exists within the larger structure of biopolitics, and refers to the ways in which medicine has been granted the power, which “automatically ‘built in’ and mobile and embodied in social practices and norms” through biopolitics, to coercively create a “normalizing imperative” upon bodies through the state (181).

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