Intersex

"This book argues that we have a duty to understand the stakes involved in the conflation of what is supposedly "natural" with what is statistically "normal," and of what is "normal" with what is "healthy." Each chapter examines a specific set of relations through which medical and cultural discourses support each other, and assesses the impact of that continuous process on medical practice, ethics, and cultural perception for those labeled "intersexed." The book also offers counter-narratives to encourage a new way of seeing intersexed people: as viable, desirable, and uniquely beautiful." "Intersex: A Perilous Difference demonstrates that for those apprehended by medicine as intersexed - the modern medical term for hermaphroditism - the rights taken to be obvious for others (agency, autonomy, and a place inside the social order) are compromised, even imperiled,^ and contradict generally accepted ethical duties to protect as a developing potential the autonomy and agency of all infants and minors. While medicine typically locates the source of peril in the presumed unintelligibility of intersexed bodies themselves, and argues that there can be no place for an intersexed subject or