Fixing Sex

Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience

Autor: Karkazis, Katrina
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822343028
eISBN Pdf: 9780822389217
Lloc de publicació: Durham , United States
Any de publicació digital: 2008
Mes: Novembre
Pàgines: 384
DDC: 616.6/94
Idioma: Anglés

Descripció

What happens when a baby is born with “ambiguous” genitalia or a combination of “male” and “female” body parts? Clinicians and parents in these situations are confronted with complicated questions such as whether a girl can have XY chromosomes, or whether some penises are “too small” for a male sex assignment. Since the 1950s, standard treatment has involved determining a sex for these infants and performing surgery to normalize the infant’s genitalia. Over the past decade intersex advocates have mounted unprecedented challenges to treatment, offering alternative perspectives about the meaning and appropriate medical response to intersexuality and driving the field of those who treat intersex conditions into a deep crisis. Katrina Karkazis offers a nuanced, compassionate picture of these charged issues in Fixing Sex, the first book to examine contemporary controversies over the medical management of intersexuality in the United States from the multiple perspectives of those most intimately involved.

Drawing extensively on interviews with adults with intersex conditions, parents, and physicians, Karkazis moves beyond the heated rhetoric to reveal the complex reality of how intersexuality is understood, treated, and experienced today. As she unravels the historical, technological, social, and political forces that have culminated in debates surrounding intersexuality, Karkazis exposes the contentious disagreements among theorists, physicians, intersex adults, activists, and parents—and all that those debates imply about gender and the changing landscape of intersex management. She argues that by viewing intersexuality exclusively through a narrow medical lens we avoid much more difficult questions. Do gender atypical bodies require treatment? Should physicians intervene to control the “sex” of the body? As this illuminating book reveals, debates over treatment for intersexuality force reassessment of the seemingly natural connections between gender, biology, and the body.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: What is Intersexuality? History and Theory
- 1. Taxonomies of Intersexuality to the 1950s
- 2. Complicating Sex, Routinizing Intervention: The Development of the Traditional Treatment Paradigm
- 3. From Socialization to Hardwire: Challenges to the Traditional Treatment Paradigm
Part 2: Making Decisions for and about a Baby with an Intersex Diagnosis
- 4. Boy or Girl? Bodies of Mixed Evidence and Gender Assignment
- 5. Fixing Sex: Surgery and the Production of Normative Sexuality
Part 3: Living the Medicalized Body
- 6. Wanting and Deciding What Is Best: Parents’ Experiences
- 7. Growing Up under the Medical Gaze: Adults’ Experiences
- 8. The Intersex Body in the World: Activism and Social and Medical Change
Notes
References
Index