Interdisciplinary and Global Perspectives on Intersex

This edited collection interrogates how social and cultural representations of individuals with intersex variations impact how they are understood and treated from legal and medical perspectives across the world. Contributors consider how novelists, filmmakers, artists, and medical professionals have represented people with intersex variations, and highlight the importance of ethical representation and autonomy to encourage wider cultural and medical knowledge of intersex variations as a naturally occurring phenomenon. The text also examines the ways in which individuals with intersex variations are represented and viewed in India, Italy, Pakistan and Israel, as well as how this impacts decision making for the individuals, families and medical providers. This book argues that reactions to intersex variations will not change unless they are no longer presented as treatable disorders. It positions representation at the forefront, shifting the emphasis away from a concern for maintaining gender norms to upholding the human rights of intersex people.

This volume will be of interest to researchers and scholars in intersex studies as well as policymakers and activists.

1. Introduction.- Part I Representing Intersex.- 2. Intersex in Fictional Films Throughout History: Towards a Cinema of Inclusion?.- 3. ‘Declining to Describe’: Intersex Narrators and Textual Visibility.- 4. The Importance of Narrative in Intersex Representation: A Literary Reading of John Money’s Case Histories.- 5. Toxic Sexing: Aaron Apps’ Intersex Poetics in Our Chemically Altered Age.- 6. ‘This Is What I Am and Who I Am’: Exploring Authorship and Ethics in Intersex Research and Reflective Diaries.- 7. When Bioethics Fails: Intersex, Epistemic Injustice and Advocacy.- 8. Afterword to "Representing Intersex".- Part II Global Intersex.- 9. Examining Autonomy and Consent in Gender Assignment Decisions on Intersex People in India.- 10. An Apparent Paradox: The Bio-medicalisation of Intersex Variations in Italy.- 11. A Critical Analysis of The Transgender (Intersex) Persons Act, 2018, in Pakistan Versus United Nations Recommendations.- 12. Towards an Inclusive Approach to Harmful Practices: The Case of Western Elective Surgeries on Intersex Children.- 13. The Geneticisation of Intersex Bodies in Israel.- 14. Western Management of Intersex and the Myth of Patient-Centred Care.- 15. Global Intersex, an Afterword: Global Medicine, Connected Communities, and Universal Human Rights.

Megan Walker is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Lincoln, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on exploring intersex narratives in a range of texts and she has a keen interest in further developing intersex knowledge, visibility and acceptance in academia and beyond.