5 Week 04

In your responses to Kessler, many of you point to a moment she describes in her work: when doctors encountering intersexuality are managing all that this situation can mean and become. The relevance of this moment, when intersexuality is treated as a condition that must be resolved through the successful identification of the body’s characteristics defined either as male or female, is powerful one. Kessler returns our attention to the ideas expressed by Grewal and Kaplan, and their argument that we tend to treat science as “value neutral” (2005). We might also compare this moment to the one that Londa Schiebinger describes, when human skeletons began to be understood in terms of the messages anatomists were thought to be decoding, about the worlds the female body was built to inhabit (1986).

In the cases Kessler refers to, the supposed objectivity of scientific knowledge is clearly overridden by doctors who cannot see beyond a two-gendered system. Grewal and Kaplan explain that one of the hallmarks of western science is its division between the natural and cultural world. “Nature” is defined as that which is untouched and unchanging while “culture” refers to the interpretations and ways of life that human beings have adopted in the different times and spaces (2005:1). In line with the questions Grewal and Kaplan raise, about what counts as difference, we have in Kessler’s article instances where doctors cannot see past a difference based on male and female to consider the kinds of bodily differences presented to them.

Pivotal to Kessler work as well as for the article(s) from Ann Fausto-Sterling on “The Five Sexes,” are ideas about the connection of the sex of the body (presumed as natural) to gender (which Kessler describes as a performance). But there are some presumptions that both Kessler and Fausto-Sterling make about “identity” that are worth examining. Both seem to suggest that identity is something that most people desire to be aligned with once and for all. But is “identity” something that we aspire towards? In Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts (2015), she stresses that identity, and gendered selfconsciousness in particular, is not something people have an immediate awareness of. Moreover, she argues that a lack of selfconsciousness about identity (and gendered identity in particular) is, for many people, something that is desirable and refreshing. I want to underline this point as it bears an important affinity to the way subjectivity is often configured in relationship to difference, as a project of assimilation.

Due Monday, February 20th, by midnight. Word count: 300 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. Absolutely no quotes should be used. If you paraphrase from the text (from Kessler’s work or anywhere else), you must be sure to include the proper citation (either MLA or APA).

In Suzanne Kessler’s essay, “The Medical Construction of Gender,” she claims that cases of intersexuality point to a lack of imagination on the part of physicians and Western society: a failure to understand how each of the “management decisions” described constitute a moment when “biological sex” is transformed into a “culturally constructed gender” (1990:26). Drawing on the examples in Kessler’s work, describe the factors that impact the way physicians, parents, and patients understand and / or manage the medical condition referred to as intersexuality.