Queering The Promissory Futures Of Intersex: Or, Has Intersex Activism Been Queer STS All Along?

• In Event: Digital Sexualities, Biomedical Practice, and Queer Realities: Activism & Sex Robots

Abstract

Since the 1990s, intersex individuals and groups have been challenging medical discourses and practices related to individuals born with sex characteristics that do not fit neatly into binary constructions of male or female. Intersex activism and scholarship has, for the best part of three decades, been doing both queer work, and STS work. For example, work on intersex has long been aware of the challenge to heteronormativity that intersex bodies pose, and that so-called “normalising” surgeries are structured by norms of compulsory heterosexuality. Intersex activism and scholarship also involves a critique of biomedical science, challenging the practice of ongoing non-consensual cosmetic surgery on infants, as well as the workings of biomedical power through, for example, the language of contemporary classification systems such as DSD (disorders of sex development). In this paper I will draw on my research into the recent history of intersex in the UK. I will examine how past boundary-making practices around intersex, trans and homosexuality can illuminate contemporary tensions, including the question of if, how and when to include the I in LGBTQI+, and what responsibilities this confers. Employing the tools of queer studies and STS, I will also question how promissory futures – either biomedical and increasingly genetic, or biosocial and mediated through online networks – might be amenable to critique, without fundamentally destabilizing the aims and practices of intersex individuals and groups. Sketching a strategic intersex futurity, I will suggest that intersex activism and scholarship may have been Queer STS all along.

Author

• David Andrew Griffiths, Surrey