Technologies of the Body Multiple: CAH, Intersex and Care for Patients in India

• In Event: Emergent Technologies in Biomedicine and Healthcare: Boundaries, Tensions, and Possibilities - III

Abstract

This paper investigates the ways in which new and nascent genetic diagnostic technologies in urban Indian engage with, produce, and assign sex in case of newborns exhibiting a spectrum of conditions known as Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH). CAH is a collection of genetic conditions affecting the adrenal glands, that clinically manifests itself by way of atypical genitalia, mainly in females, but also in males, often resulting in surgical intervention to produce a more typically sexed appearance. I look into the ways in which new transnational genetic technologies, in cohort with clinical diagnoses and consultation sessions between geneticists, doctors, psychiatrists and parents, evaluate normality and abnormality vis-à-vis sexuality and gender. Using ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2014 at a diagnostic lab and among doctors, patients, and families of patients in Pune, India, I examine the difficult translations between transnational certainties of identity as intersex in many cases of CAH, societal expectations of gendered and sexed bodies in urban India, and seemingly dislocated and scientific genetic accounts of normality and naming.

Author

• Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Indian Institute of Technology Madras