Final Post

Trying to articulate what I learned in this course would take a lot of time considering the amount of material we covered. I came in with only a minimal amount of academically gained knowledge about feminism, the queer community, and queer theory. This caused some conflicts in my head. I had an idea of feminism as a primarily political collection of ideologies. Since they are perceived to be founded upon political struggle, it can be difficult to isolate the theoretical from the political, and think about feminist and queer theory without immediately attempting to link them to political reality. In my first post, I even suggested that perhaps feminists should resist abstractedly theorizing for theorizing’s sake. In other words, if it is a discussion that does not lead to a practical improvement in the lives of real people, drop it. Through readings and discussion, I learned the importance of continually questioning, and how keeping an open dialogue is what is most practically beneficial for both theoretical inquiry, and real life. Though feminist theory and the political struggle faced by women and members of the queer community are inexorably linked, using this course to primarily concentrate on discussing theory and literature allowed me to think about ideology in a more abstract way.

Gender was also a topic which we frequently discussed, and I tried to use this opportunity in developing my own theory of gender. Intersex birth in particular, brings up many questions in relation to gender, and presents a direct challenge to the perceived gender binary in our society. As a result, we have learned, society often designates one part of that binary for people born with conflicting anatomies. Identity may be the most important part in designating gender. It may be beneficial to stop thinking about gender so categorically. Instead, perhaps the gender a person identifies themselves as is the gender they are, and since identity is subject to change, perhaps gender is fluid and also subject to change.

My Creative Piece

Although it is currently a work in progress, I have solidified some ideas regarding making a creative piece that demonstrates the theory my project is based upon. Since my project is about intersex births and unintelligibility, the creative piece had to reflect this in some way. I decided to write a short story in the style of a Chandleresque private detective story. This fits, since in creating our theories we are acting as detectives, linking pieces of knowledge to form a new cohesive whole and solve the case, so to speak.

In the story, told in first person from the perspective of the private detective, a client comes to the office because someone has stolen their gender. The PI doesn’t bat an eye, and takes the case. Butler tells us that we “undo” each other, and that some people are unintelligible in our society. The client has been “undone” because someone has taken this person’s gender away from them, or worse, dictated their gender to them. The client is unintelligible because his gender has literally been taken away from him, it is impossible to articulate who he is, gender-wise.

By the end of the story, the detective will have found a gender-stealing company called Society Inc., which grinds the stolen genders up and gives them back to people damaged or changed. I might rethink this idea, or change the story to make everything more symbolic and less blatant, but that’s what I have at this point. The main point of the story is to demonstrate, in a fictional way, the theory I build that argues what changes are necessary for intersexed people to become intelligible. Please feel free to comment if you have any ideas or suggestions about this or the project a whole, I could use them.

-Ziev

Butler's Take On Intersex

As per Professor Renzi’s recommendation, I looked at chapters 3 and 4 of Undoing Gender in order to build the theory for my project. As I said in class, Butler believes that those of intersex birth are “unintelligible” in our society, and they suffer social violence because of this. At this point, my project will aim to develop a way to make intersex people intelligible in our society. I am still considering ways to go about doing this, and if I can’t develop any arguments that are convincing enough, I might instead build upon Butler’s theory regarding why these people are not intelligible.

The challenge lies in finding a solution to this problem in a general, theoretical way, and not simply list off the practical changes that would need to be made in arenas like law, media, and education. Since intersex people are not acknowledged often enough in our society from the top down, it would be a paper on policy rather than theory.

So how does Butler reach her conclusion that intersex people are unintelligible? Her theory uses a case of an intersex birth in which David Reimer found himself in the middle of an ideological battle between two conflicting doctors, John Money and Milton Diamond, which she discusses in chapter 3 (62). Money believed that gender occurred as a result of socialization and was malleable, meaning that through being raised a certain gender, an intersex person could become either a man or a woman both anatomically and mentally. Diamond believed that gender was fixed at birth depending on the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, and should be surgically corrected if the anatomy does not reflect genetics. Butler, of course, states that she neither confirms nor denies Money’s theory, social construction, or Diamond’s theory, gender essentialism (67). Instead, she believes that gender is more fluid and less fixed, and that intersexed people are robbed of their autonomy for being forced to conform to this perception (81).

It is the commonly accepted notion that gender is permanent and fixed that ultimately makes those born of indeterminate sex, existing physically and behaviorally across a range of gender identification that could be subject change with personal evolution, that results in their unintelligibility. It is the perception that they sick, ill, or simply “wrong” that results in their oppression. Butler quotes Isay’s belief that diagnosis undermines the autonomy of children and mistakes it for pathology. By pathologizing “Gender Identity Disorder” and diagnosing it, the “medical machinery” Butler mentions is enacted and intersex infants suffer a form of social violence that robs them of their ability to exist as they are, and in turn, robs them of their autonomy.