Engaging peers and future parents, creating future turbulence: activist biocitizenship practices and intersex transgression in the classroom

ABSTRACT

This study aims to develop a more fully theorised concept of biocitizenship as part of the teaching of intersex in critical approaches to sex education. It advances a perspective in which the options of students, as future parents and as biocitizens, are not limited to compliance to biomedicine, but one in which formal education experiences might prepare them to be neighbours and parents who, as allies of intersex family/community members, can engage in political activism to effect change where deemed necessary. Data take the form of classroom talk drawn from a study based in an Aotearoa/New Zealand secondary school, focusing on transgressive acts of citizenship by an intersex activist visiting the sex education classroom and assisting students with social justice projects. Transcripts of audio-recorded classroom interactions are analysed using a version of critical discourse analysis that directs attention to semiotic modes such as visual cues of bodies as well as affect. Findings reveal that biocitizenship can also include those who accept intersex bodies, altering established practices to accommodate those bodies and the people who live them.

KEYWORDS:

• Activist citizenship
• biocitizens
• critical education
• intersex
• turbulence

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Mani aligns to this definition as a co-creator of the Darlington Statement, a statement of consensus by Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand intersex associations and independent advocates.

2. These ideas sit in tension with notions of human rights, which hold that all human beings are inherently endowed with certain rights. Isin reminds us that the upholding of human rights can be prevented by established citizenship practices.

3. Cisgender refers to those who are assigned a gender at birth that corresponds with their current gender identity. Endosex refers to those whose physical sex characteristics fit within culturally dominant expectations.

4. Ethics approval for this study was granted by Victoria University of Wellington Human Ethics Committee (Ethics Approval: No 16,069). Informed consent was obtained from all participants in writing before the project commenced.

5. Although Mani identifies as non-binary, there is no simple connection between non-binary gender identity and intersex bodies. In an Australian sample, it was learned that only about twenty percent identified as gender non-binary (Carpenter 2018).