‘Bridging the Sexes’: Feelings, Professional Communities and Emotional Practices in the Spanish Intersex Clinic

ABSTRACT

Health professionals' emotions in the Spanish Intersex Clinic (SIC) act as structures of feeling, not easily available for analysis. Then, what is their role in configuring clinical judgments and decisions regarding non-binary bodies? Non-crystallized structures of feeling emerge as shared practices by the professional community. These practices allow them to square their expectations of a de-emotionalized clinical objectivity and to relieve a distress allegedly caused by a corporeal difference, and not by a sex/gender system that has a hard time processing embodied diversities. In their emotional practices of (un)bridging the (dichotomy of) sexes in the SIC, clinicians emotionally activate (handling fear and uncertainty, showing empathy, using emotionally evocative images), and also emotionally deactivate narratives of sexual difference (using insipid terminology, overusing technical jargon, managing information mechanically, or through acts of debarring to avoid emotions). Emotional practices play a decisive role in interconnecting and shaping ways of doing (strategies, techniques, values) with entities (body, artifacts), to put into practice the knowledge systems that place the human body inside a sexual binary. To envision a language for these practices can bring awareness of the role played by emotions. More importantly, it can facilitate taking into consideration the agency of patients, including possible non binary decisions about their bodies.

KEYWORDS:

• Spanish intersex clinic
• intersex people
• sexual binarism
• structures of feeling
• emotionalization practices
• emotional community

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of the doctoral research ‘The intersex clinic as a ‘contact zone’: crafted knowledges, feelings and practices. (Doctoral Program Women's Studies, Discourses and Gender Practices, University of Granada). We would like to thank the reviewers and editors for the valuable comments provided.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Sam Fernández-Garrido is a PhD Candidate Women and Gender Studies Doctorate Program, University of Granada, Granada, Spain.

Rosa M. Medina-Domenech is a senior lecturer at the History of Science Department and Member of the Women and Gender Studies Research Institute, University of Granada, Granada, Spain.

Notes

1 The Guardian (18 January 2017) covered the publication of the book and its consequences for rethinking the cultural construction of sexual difference: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/18/testosterone-rex-review-cordelia-fine

2 On the relationship between 15M, feminism and sexual diversity see: https://www.opendemocracy.net/sandra-ezquerra/feminist-practice-in-15-m; and Fernández-Garrido and Araneta (in Platero et al., 2017).

3 The most recent is Law 2/2016, 29 March, on Identity and Gender Expression, Social Equality and Non-discrimination of the Community of Madrid. Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE) no 169, 14 July 2016.

4 Middlesex Clinic is an English hospital center for the management of “differences in sexual development”. For more information see: https://www.uclh.nhs.uk/OurServices/ServiceA-Z/WH/GYNAE/DSD/Pages/Home.aspx

5 All names used to identify informants are fictitious, in order to preserve the interviewees’ anonymity.

6 See entry for “insípido” in the Dictionary of the RAE (Real Academia de la Lengua española) in: http://dle.rae.es/srv/fetch?id=Ll5gYt7

7 The relationship between the size of the clitoris and suspicions of lesbianism can be found in surgical texts from the eighteenth century. These writers proposed amputation since a large clitoris was seen as an element that would allow the owner to sodomize other women (Fiocchetto, 1993). In that same century, hermaphrodites were seen as “poor macroclitorideal women” (Cleminson and Medina-Domenech, 2004, p.78).

8 Sara Creighton et al. (2002) have analyzed the use of photographs in scientific publications that show the naked bodies of intersex people with their eyes blacked out.

Additional information

Funding

This research project has been partially financed/supported by the State Research Agency (SRA) (HAR2016-78223-C2-2-P) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).