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Signature: ___________________________ ______________ David Rubin April 15, 2010 Intersex Before and After Gender By David Rubin Doctor of Philosophy Women‘s Studies ______________________________________ Lynne Huffer, Ph.D. Advisor ______________________________________ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Ph.D. Committee Member ______________________________________ Holloway Sparks, Ph.D. Committee Member Accepted: _____________________________________ Lisa A. Tedesco, Ph.D. Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies ______________ Date Intersex Before and After Gender By David Rubin M.A., University of Arizona, 2004 M.A., University of Arizona, 2003 B.A., University of Washington, 2000 B.A., University of Washington, 2000 Advisor: Lynne Huffer, Ph.D. An abstract of a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Women‘s Studies 2010 Abstract Intersex Before and After Gender By David Rubin The term intersex names the myriad conditions and features of people born with sexual anatomies that society considers to be nonstandard. This dissertation exposes the logic of gender as it emerges through a detailed examination of the normalization of intersex bodies. While women‘s studies scholars were among the first to critique the medical model of intersex management for its complicity with processes of gender regulation, recent intersex scholarship and activism has focused almost exclusively on the negative impacts of surgical normalization. One effect of this focus has been a lack of attention to other important considerations, such as the ways in which the medical management of intersexuality is linked with the biopolitical regulation of gender difference more broadly. This dissertation argues that the theories of women‘s and gender studies reveal that current understandings of intersex are inextricable from gendered relations of power and knowledge. Developing an innovative interdisciplinary methodology that draws upon feminist, queer, and disability theories, textual, discursive, institutional, and genealogical analysis, as well as social movement history, the history of science, and transnational cultural studies, this dissertation‘s particular contributions lay in its insistence that intersex has fundamentally shaped the history of gender as a concept and practice in twentieth and twenty-first century Western culture; that a critical attention to the history and politics of intersex phenomena productively complicates and reframes dominant understandings of gender, sex, sexuality, and embodiment in biomedical, women‘s studies, and activist discourses; that feminist, queer, and disability studies frameworks shed new light on key dilemmas and debates in intersex activism and advocacy work; and that historicizing intersex as a category that both precedes and, to a significant degree, inaugurates late modern understandings of gender opens up new perspectives on body politics, health, and normality. Intersex Before and After Gender By David Rubin M.A., University of Arizona, 2004 M.A., University of Arizona, 2003 B.A., University of Washington, 2000 B.A., University of Washington, 2000 Advisor: Lynne Huffer, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Women‘s Studies 2010 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Intersex Before and After Gender 1-58 Chapter 1. ―An Unnamed Blank that Craved a Name‖: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender 59-104 Chapter 2. The Gender Trouble with Intersex in Women‘s Studies 105-143 Chapter 3. The Gender Trouble with Women‘s Studies in Intersex Activism and Scholarship 144-187 Chapter 4. Intersex Activism, Medical ―Normalization,‖ and Human Rights in a Transnational Frame 188-232 Conclusion: Gender and the Future of Intersex 233-251 Bibliography 252-271 ix Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the following individuals for helping me to bring this dissertation to fruition. For their intellectual guidance, tireless support, and overwhelming generosity, I wish to express my enduring appreciation and deepest gratitude to Lynne Huffer, my dissertation advisor, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Holloway Sparks, my dissertation committee. I am also extremely grateful to Miranda Joseph, whose teaching and kindness has profoundly shaped my work. For sharing their insights on intersex issues, I thank David Cameron Strachan, Marcus Arana, Anne Tamar-Mattis, Monica Casper, Caitlin Petrakis Childs, and the late Max Beck. For helping me to think about the project in various ways, I thank: Rez Pullen, Angie Willie, Elizabeth Vennel, Cathy Caruth, Carla Freeman, Claire Nouvet, Beth Reingold, Elizabeth Wilson, Martine Brownley, Cynthia Willett, Geoffrey Bennington, Deepika Bahri, Jonathan Goldberg, Judith Halberstam, Gayatri Gopinath, Moya Bailey, Stefanie Speanburg, Jae Turner, Sarah Prince, Brandi Simula, Shruthi Vissa, Shannan Palma, Sandra Soto, Eric Hayot, Charlie Bertsch, Elizabeth Kennedy, Agatha Beins, Laura Briggs, Amy Harrington, and LeKeisha Hughes. For their unwavering support throughout the years, I thank my family: Terry Eliseuson, Jerry Rubin, Alex Rubin, and Mildred Rubin; and my longtime friends, Zach Zulauf, Scott Lindsay, Ayako Takamori, and Rehka Kuver. I am very lucky to have a consummate philosopher-friend in Solan Jascha Jensen. For his enduring faith, invaluable advice, and unparalleled solidarity, I cannot thank Joshua Marie Wilkinson enough. Tony and Zoë deserve special recognition for reminding me of what‘s important. Finally, words cannot adequately express the extent of my indebtedness to Juliet Ceballos, my partner-in-crime, whose generosity, both intellectual and emotional, continues daily to enrich my work and life. This dissertation was written with the generous support of a George W. Woodruff Fellowship from Emory University. Research for Chapter 4 was supported by a fellowship from the Institute of Comparative and International Studies at Emory. Portions of this dissertation were presented in earlier, shorter, and different forms at a number of forums: the 2008 and 2009 Modern Language Association conferences; the 2009 National Women‘s Studies Association conference; the 2009 Feminist Disability Theories and the Law conference at Emory Law School; the 2009 and 2010 Southeastern Women‘s Studies Association conferences; and the 2010 Queer Visibilities conference at Emory University. I would like to thank the organizers of these events for giving me the chance to present my scholarship and audience members for their feedback. 1 Introduction Intersex Before and After Gender There are humans, in other words, who live and breathe in the interstices of this binary relation, showing that it is not exhaustive; it is not necessary.—Judith Butler1 I. Overview The term intersex names the myriad conditions and features of people born with sexual anatomies that society considers to be nonstandard. I say ―sexual anatomies that society considers to be nonstandard‖ rather than simply ―nonstandard sexual anatomies‖ to call attention to the social overdetermination of the meaning of intersexuality. The prefix inter- literally means ―among, between, in the midst of.‖ But it would not be quite right to say that people with intersex exist ―between‖ the sexes, nor that all those diagnosed or self-identified as intersex live and breathe in what Butler calls ―the interstices‖ of the ―binary relation‖ of gender, though some surely do. Rather, it is at the level of social and cultural intelligibility, broadly construed, that intersexuality disrupts binary schemas of sex and gender. For this reason, intersex has not been accepted as part of the order of things. Society—medicine in particular—has managed these interstitial conditions through surgery. The surgical normalization of intersex infants did not become standard practice in Western medicine until the mid-twentieth century. During the early 1990s, an activist critique of the surgical model of intersex management emerged in the United States and, 1 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 65. 2 as the millennium approached, in other parts of the globe.2 Inspired in part by the work of intersex activists, scholars from across the humanities and social sciences have shown a growing interest in intersex issues in recent years, and have sought to understand intersexuality from perspectives other than those which dominate the biomedical sciences.3 Within this expanding body of work, women‘s and gender studies scholarship has played a crucial but often misunderstood role. While