#lena eckert

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The quest for a scientifically verifiable distinction between male and female is based upon creating a Third in order to reify the binary.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 187

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Through surgical intervention, Money et al. enabled medicine to erase the visible signs of intersexuality. Predicating their recommendations based on two supposedly distinct body morphologies (maleness/femaleness), they created two corresponding gender roles (masculine/feminine) and disallowed any body or gender role that called this system into question. The surgical intervention they advocated was solely focused on the genitalia. Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues that “swapping the totality for the parts that compose it, ignoring the fact that each part contains the whole” particularly marks the logic of bio-power (1994: 48). This synechdochal logic blatantly reveals itself in the process of intersexualization. Not whole bodies but specific parts—organs—are organized and classified in a hierarchical scheme. As Riki Wilchins and David Valentine note, “genitals account for only 1 percent of the body’s surface area” but they “carry an enormous amount of cultural weight” (1997: 215). Looking at narratives and practices pertaining to intersexualized bodies reveals that genitals ultimately function as the key and the truth of the body.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 50.

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To recap the process, a hermaphroditic body presents itself to the physician. This body carries both visible and invisible physiological clues that provide critical information revealing its (presumed) tendency towards either maleness/masculinity or femaleness/femininity. In this space of the clinic, the doctors will set their gaze on specific body parts, components, and fluids and produce them as either male or female. In a next step they will impose onto that body a range of future desires and practices understood as exclusively masculine or feminine. Yet, even though the true sex of the body is indeterminable in the framework of male and female sex coordinates, a gender role as masculine or feminine is then assigned and its material signifiers (external genitalia) constructed through surgery in order to provide the best sex—the OGR. The OGR the optimum gender of rearing—is that which results in a gender role as unambiguously feminine or masculine behavior.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 46-47.

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Papua New Guinea maintains a special status for anthropological research because of its linguistic and cultural diversity. More than 800 languages are spoken in an area smaller than 463km2. The country holds a unique fascination for anthropologists specializing in sex, gender, and sexuality. Anthropologist Bruce Knauft lists more than 20 different researchers who have conducted field-work on gender and sexuality in this “object of Western epistemic gaze” (1994: 396).1 Herdt and Stoller’s interest in a Shaman who seemed to them to be intersex, then, is not merely yet another problematic anthropological project located in the anthropologists’ mecca of Papa New Guinea. It is emblematic of anthropological research into human sexuality and stands in for the ignorance towards neo_colonial aspects which emerge, when researchers from the Global North infiltrate the Global South to gain knowledge on sensitive issues such as sex- gender-sexuality-systems.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 134

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One difference between intersex and intersexualization... is what is considered to be the phenomenon. In intersex it is the intersex* body that helps distinguish between the categories of male and female, and in intersexualization it is the researcher that is considered to be the phenomenon. The term intersex suggests that the body in question is non-normative or even non-natural whereas intersexualization draws attention to the fact that the phenomenon is the experts’ desire to pathologize and medicalize. In cross-cultural intersexualization we are additionally faced with the desire of the expert to universalize Western systems of sex, gender, sexuality, and notions of personhood.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 151

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In the process of intersexualization, John Money’s gender role and Robert Stoller’s gender identity had wide-reaching consequences for feminist thinking. In fact, much of feminist theory is indebted to Money’s and Stoller’s coinage of the gender-concept; it was first introduced to feminist thought by Ann Oakley’s widely read Sex, Gender and Society (1972). Gender, as something distinct from sex has since enabled feminist theory to shed light on sex(ual) difference as historically variable, and consequently as dependent on gendered conceptualizations in the bio-medical disciplines. For more than 40 years, feminist scholars have continued to develop gender as an analytical tool to interrogate social, political, and cultural formations. Feminist theorists from all over the world have happily engaged in using the gender-concept as a tool to dismantle patriarchy, (hetero-)sexism, and discrimination. The gender-concept, however, based on the distinction between sex and gender helped establish the pathologization of individuals who express incoherence between the two. This pathologization results in intersexualization and has one unquestionable back-drop—even though intersex questions it fundamentally—the naturalness and normality of dimorphic sex. The problems that arise from this fact are not just to be seen in feminist theorization but also of course in the treatment paradigms of intersexuality that are still in place.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 105

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Herdt’s and Stoller’s newly invented method of clinical ethnography—developed in part through their study of Sakulambei—is significant in intersex history because it takes intersexualization into a cross-cultural i.e., neo_colonial context. I focus on the interview with Sakulambei at length because it illuminates specific aspects of the processes of medicalization and pathologization in intersexualizations. In intersexualization the visual is central in constructing bodies as non- normal and modes of gazing at bodies exert the power to diagnose. In cross-cultural intersexualization it is not just the clinical gaze but also the hegemonic Western gaze that is employed to dissect and categorize the body of the ‘other.’ The normalizing powers of the clinical gaze in clinical ethnography are multiplied because local meanings of bodies and psyches are overridden by neo_colonial modes of knowledge production.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 150

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In fact, any of these terms that are based on notions such as alternate, ambiguous, either/or, neither/ nor and so on are problematic because they imply the status of a hybrid constellation for the non-normative and in the same vein install the non-hybrid or pure, real, and normal character of the two sexes_genders.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 187-8.

Moreover, as philosopher of science Myra Hird argues, “replacing a two-sex model with a 10-sex (or 20 or 30) model does not in itself secure the abolition of gender discrimination, only perhaps that the mental gymnastics required to justify such discrimination becomes more complex” (2000: 358). The supposed discovery of third, fourth, or even more genders reifies the binary opposition of man and woman rather than disrupting it, and hence imposes sex(ualiz)ed and gendered constructs that may be inapplicable.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 188.

Being bound to the Third as a morphological, psychological, or identificatory category disciplines the perception of the huge variety of identities, practices, and processes according to the coordinates of a binary and heteronormative sex-gender-sexuality-system.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 189.

However, the history of the concept of hybridity makes its employment problematic because hybridity is historically a violent term describing people who are ‘mixed-breeds,’ so-called products of ‘miscegenation.’ It is deeply intertwined with nineteenth-century eugenicist and scientific- racist discourse (Mitchell, 1997; Werbner & Modood, 1997; Young, 1995). Therefore, I do see problems with using it because the references it combines reaffirm the two entities, which are supposedly more ‘pure’ and then merge into the hybrid. The notion of the hybrid in itself implies that there is such a thing as purity, whether it is in relation to identity, gender, body, nationality, ethnicity, or origin in general. Moreover, whenever there is a third (no matter if it is an identity, a body, or a space) the first two are implicit and are thought of and listed according to a specific hierarchy. This hierarchy makes one of the two entities the more dominant, hegemonically more justified, debatably more important part and the second one less influential, less important, and more likely to be disregarded. The Third is always based on a first and a second and these are not free from their hierarchical reference system. Theorizing the hybrid means to recognize that there is no such thing in the first place because everything is hybrid—is difference—difference and composition.

-Intersexualization: The Clinic and the Colony, Lena Eckert, pg 193-4.