Feminist Authors Showcase: Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine was published on March 8, 2023 by Duke University Press (ISBN: 978-1-4780-1961-9) and is written by Amanda Lock Swarr, Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. This year’s NWSA conference theme, A Luta Continua/The Struggle Continues, is inspired by a song of the name name by South African singer Miriam Makeba. “A Luta Continua” was a rallying cry for justice that emanated from southern Africa to the rest of the world in the 1970s. This book and the proposed “Author Meets Critics” session extends Makeba and other Africans’ calls from this region to the present moment with a focus on intersex justice.

Envisioning African Intersex answers the question posed by the NWSA conference organizers: how can calls for freedom and reflections on historic liberation movements inspire struggles in the twenty-first century? One of the most important contemporary struggles is intersex activists’ movement against nonconsensual medical violence. There are few more pressing issues than forced surgeries and other procedures that attempt to fit bodies into rigid binaries without their consent. This book links these ongoing unethical and violent practices to the deep entrenchment of scientific racism, eugenics, and colonial taxonomies. It unpacks how gender testing in sport and broader anxieties over the expansion of the category of “woman” are inherently racist.

Women’s Studies has always been at the forefront of exploring what it means to be a woman, and in the current moment this must include prioritizing intersex and trans women’s struggles as essential to our field. Envisioning African Intersex advances that project. Coalitions of activists from across the African continent—including South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia—are calling for intersex justice. By unseating colonial visions of gender, intersex South Africans are actively disrupting medical violence, decolonizing gender binaries, and inciting policy changes. This book and the proposed “Author Meets Critics” session focused on it puts their efforts in historical perspective and follows their theories and actions to the present moment.

Sub Unit

• General Conference

Presenters

• Amanda Swarr, University of Washington, Seattle

• Hil Malatino, Penn State

• Xavier Livermon, University of Texas, Austin

• David Rubin, University of South Florida