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.
This is a very interesting and tough topic to pick up as your final project. I give you props! It seems to me, from your summary, that Butler is hinting at a way to make them intelligable- through the recognition of transgender as a gender. I am however, a bit confused, are they talking about sex or about gender here? I believe there are actually 5 different sexes (based on chromosomes) and from that we ended up (somehow) with two dominant genders. In my opinion, though, adding a third gender (aka the transgendered) as a gender will not really solve the problem, though it may help. It seems to me to make people who are inbetween genders, for whatever reason, intelligable we need to either discredit the theory of gender and not use that as away of defining a person (which is radical and probably near impossible to do) OR- in a more likely way to happen- we start to recognize gender as a gradient with people falling all over the spectrum. These are just some of my ideas on the subject though. I am excited to see what you come up with!
ReplyDeleteDefinitely interesting stuff, Ziev. I think, with all of the readings and discussions from class this semester, it seems that the "medical machinery" is definitely means through which those in the margins - queers, transgender, transexual, etc - continue to be oppressed. Fabricating an actuality of one's identity into a medical, pathological "disorder" makes everything seem more civil and righteous, all the while condemning queer lifestyles wrong and something that needs curing. I'm not sure that we'll ever come to any conclusion between Money or Diamond, but there are enough horrifying stories of "corrections" gone wrong to really make you think about the ways in which we "treat" gender and intersex issues.
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